Scientists have found a strange marshmallow-like planet in the deep cosmos

Astronomers find all sorts of strange worlds.

Some are likely to rain gems from metallic clouds. Others may be entirely covered by vast oceans. And scientists now have a new addition to the planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets: meet the “fluffy” world TOI-3757 b. Astronomers believe it has an atmospheric density similar to that of a marshmallow.

Strange? Absolutely. But our planet is also deeply strange. There’s no reason to believe that the universe—a place teeming with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars and untold numbers of planets—won’t be, well, otherworldly.

On a mountain in Arizona, astronomers at Kitt Peak National Observatory used an 11.5-foot-wide telescope called WIYN to study the Jupiter-like gas world about 580 light-years away in space. It orbits a common but strange type of star called a “red dwarf.” These stars are much smaller and fainter than the Sun, but they’re terribly fickle: they shoot out violent flares that can render nearby planets inhospitable. TOI-3757 b is “the densest planet ever discovered around a red dwarf star,” explains the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, which operates large telescopes in the United States

How did this gas world get so fluffy?

Planetary scientists proposed two ideas for the planet’s marshmallow-like atmosphere:

1. Gas giants like Jupiter begin life as rocky cores many times the mass of Earth. According to NOIRLab, they use this mass to pull in nearby gas as the solar system forms. But the red dwarf contains fewer heavy elements than other such stars, meaning the planet’s rocky core may have formed slowly, “delaying” the process of drawing in surrounding gas. Ultimately, TOI-3757 b was left with a less dense, flaky atmosphere than other Jupiter-like planets orbiting these stars.

2. TOI-3757 b’s orbit around its red dwarf star may be elliptical. “Sometimes it gets closer to its star than other times, causing significant overheating that can cause the planet’s atmosphere to balloon,” explains NOIRLab.

The tweet may have been deleted
(opens in a new tab)

Want more science and technology news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter today.

Planetary scientists will continue to study this strange world. And they have the help of the most powerful space telescope ever built, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. The Telescope carries special equipment called spectrometers, which can find out what the atmospheres of distant, alien worlds are made of. (Some planets might contain water, methane, and carbon dioxide, for example, which might mean they’re habitable worlds.)

“Possible future observations of this planet’s atmosphere with NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope could help shed light on its bloated nature,” says Jessica Libby-Roberts, author of the new research on TOI-3757 b and a postdoctoral researcher at Pennsylvania State University said in a statement.

NASA’s specialized exoplanet sniffer dog, a space telescope called TESS, originally discovered this marshmallow world. TESS observes exoplanets moving in front of their respective stars and uses the information it observes from the slight eclipse to assess the planet’s size and orbit. Astronomers can then use other telescopes to estimate an exoplanet’s mass, density, and more.

As of October 2022, scientists have confirmed the existence of 5,190 exoplanets, and the agency is working to confirm over 8,000 more objects. There is certainly no evidence that any of these worlds contain life. But a good portion of these realms — particularly large rocky worlds called “super-Earths” — can exhibit conditions that could be temperate, water-rich, and habitable.

stay tuned folks Exoplanet research is heating up. Marshmallow worlds won’t be the last wild thing to be found out there.