Ciencia.-Descubren planetas "superesponjosos" más ligeros que el...

An international collaboration led by the University of Oxford, with Université Côte d’Azur/Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and the University of Birmingham, has identified two of the least dense giant planets ever found. The study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, focuses on “super-puffy” planets TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c, which orbit an F7 dwarf about 1,110 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Volans. Although their sizes are similar to Jupiter, their densities are extremely low: 0.038 g/cm³ for TOI-791 b and 0.047 g/cm³ for TOI-791 c, far below Jupiter’s 1.33 g/cm³ and even under typical “sugar cotton” values (~0.05 g/cm³). The planets are thought to be siblings formed from the same gas and dust disk, and they show a 5:3 near-resonance that alters transit timing. They were flagged as candidates by Planet Hunters TESS volunteers in 2019 and 2023.