Strange ‘puffy’ alien world breaks every rule for how planets should behave | Astronomers have discovered TOI-4507b, a planet 9x wider than Earth, but only 30 times its mass, giving it the classification of a “super-puff” exoplanet.

https://www.space.com/astronomy/exoplanets/strange-puffy-alien-world-breaks-every-rule-for-how-planets-should-behave

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3 Comments

  1. TL;DR for its “strangeness”:

    >TOI-4507 b is on a nearly polar orbit; it swings around its star almost perfectly perpendicular to the star’s rotation. It has a relatively close orbit, completing an entire revolution in just 105 days — but this also makes it one of the longest-period super-puffs ever found. So we have a low-density, puffy planet orbiting relatively far from a young star in a nearly perpendicular orbit.

  2. JasonWaterfaII on

    If this planet breaks every rule for how planets should behave that tells me they are more like guidelines than rules and we need to revise our rules for planet behavior.