Researchers using the Kitt Peak National Observatory have identified a puffy, low-density 'marshmallow' planet orbiting a cool red dwarf star.
Exoplanets come in all sorts of sizes and all sorts of densities, from solid rocky planets like Earth or Mars to super-puff planets discovered by Hubble. Now, researchers using the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory have identified a puffy, low-density “marshmallow” planet orbiting a cool red dwarf star. TOI-3757 b, located 580 light-years away, is the lowest-density gas giant planet ever discovered orbiting this kind of star.
“Giant planets around red dwarf stars have traditionally been thought to be hard to form,” said lead researcher Shubham Kanodia of the Carnegie Institution for Science in a statement. “So far this has only been looked at with small samples from Doppler surveys, which typically have found giant planets further away from these red dwarf stars. Until now we have not had a large enough sample of planets to find close-in gas planets in a robust manner.
Current estimations put the density of the planet at an average of 0.27 grams per cubic centimeter, which is less than half the density of Saturn — “or in fact, similar in density to a marshmallow,” as NOIRLab writes.
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