Beyond Neptune: NASA excited by new colossal ghost planet that defies science

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Is there a planet beyond Neptune?What is the new planet WASP-193b?Hidden planet beyond Neptune found using Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP)More questions than answers

Space Oddity: NASA confirms the existence of WASP-193b – A giant, marshmallow-like planet beyond Neptune!
Credit: Shutterstock, Vadim Sadovski

NASA has finally confirmed the existence of WASP-193b. And hold onto your space helmets, because it’s a very big discovery… A ‘Ghost Planet’ that shouldn’t exist according to experts.

Scientists worldwide are baffled. How did it get there? What else are we blissfully unaware of? Read on to find out more.

For years, theories about hidden planets lurking in deep space have fueled wild speculation – Planet X, Planet 9, Nibiru, the list goes on and on. Could a mysterious rogue world be out there, evading detection? Could science be missing something massive, something it can’t yet understand or explain?…

Is there a planet beyond Neptune?

Now, NASA-backed astronomers have found something so strange, so unexplainable, it’s throwing planetary science into complete turmoil. Meet WASP-193b – a colossal, puffy giant that defies every rule in the book. It’s 50% bigger than Jupiter but barely there at all, floating like a cosmic ghost and lies beyond Neptune. Scientists admit they have no idea how it formed, and no existing theories can explain it.

Is it a missing link in planetary evolution? A glitch in the simulation? Proof that the universe is playing tricks on us?

The deeper we look into space, the weirder it gets, and the more we realise that everything we think we know is wrong. What else don’t we know?

What is the new planet WASP-193b?

Discovered by a team from MIT, the University of Liège in Belgium, and other institutions, this colossal oddball is 50% larger than Jupiter but barely has any weight to it. Scientists describe its density as absurdly low – comparable to a literal marshmallow drifting through space.

“Finding giant planets with such incredibly low density is extremely rare,” says Khalid Barkaoui, the MIT postdoctoral researcher leading the study. “We call them ‘puffy Jupiters,’ but this one is on a whole new level. We don’t know how it exists.” If you tried to land on WASP-193b, you’d probably just fall straight through.

Among the 5,400+ exoplanets discovered so far, WASP-193b is officially one of the fluffiest ever found. Thanks to its sheer size, it’s in a class of its own. Imagine a planet-sized candy floss, slowly drifting through the cosmos. “It doesn’t fit into any of our existing models,” admits Francisco Pozuelos, a senior researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia. “This thing is a planetary paradox – it just shouldn’t be there.”

Hidden planet beyond Neptune found using Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP)

Astronomers first spotted the planet through the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP), an international collaboration that scans thousands of stars using robotic telescopes. Their job? Catch hidden planets when they pass in front of their host stars. And boy, did they hit the jackpot with this one.

Once astronomers crunched the numbers, the results were staggering. WASP-193b’s mass is just 14% of Jupiter’s, while its density sits at a near-nonexistent 0.059 grams per cubic centimetre. For reference:

Jupiter: 1.33 grams per cubic centimetre
Earth: 5.51 grams per cubic centimetre
WASP-193b: Practically air
Cotton candy: 0.05 grams per cubic centimetre

Yes, you read that right. This planet is only slightly denser than cotton candy.

WASP-193b is likely made up of hydrogen and helium, much like other gas giants, but its atmosphere appears to stretch tens of thousands of kilometres beyond Jupiter’s own – like a cosmic balloon expanding in slow motion.