Astronomers have uncovered a pair of giant planets that are lighter than cotton candy — super-puffs the size of Jupiter. The featherweight pair — orbiting a star 1,110 light-years away — are the biggest exoplanets found to have less density than cotton candy.

Discovery Details

Detected by NASA’s Tess satellite over the past decade, these two especially puffy-puffs orbit a star in the southern constellation Volans, known as the flying fish. The researchers studied the planets’ orbits using telescopes on Earth to determine their density, from 1,110 light-years away.

Jupiter, by comparison, is as much as 35 times denser than these two lightweights. Considered rare in the cosmos, super-puffs are thought to form around the disk of gas and dust around a newborn star where there is more gas than dust.

According to the University of Oxford’s George Dransfield, these fluffy, wispy worlds are probably mostly hydrogen and helium, although it will take follow-up observations by NASA’s Webb Space Telescope to confirm their chemical makeup.

Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.