Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum puffy...the latest extra-solar planet

the oddest extra-solar planet yet of the ~200 known thus far has been found circling a star in a binary system...

a gas giant, its density is such that they say it could float on water...

Planet Puff

Interesting find. Can we call it "Puff the magic planet" yet?

I admit, when I saw the title of this post I thought you were going to make a joke about Puff Daddy. Lord knows he's as far out there as the next extra-solar planet

Interesting that it's so near its parent star. I suppose it would have to orbit it much faster at that distance to avoid falling in.

Nice item anyman:

The link provided states the astronomers made two observations regarding Puffy,
1. The orbit radius is about 1/20 of the Earths orbit;
2. The orbit completes itself in about 4.5 days.

The Earths average orbit radius is about 92,961,440 miles. 1/20 would be about 4,648,072 miles. The circumference of the orbit (4.648,072 * 6.2832) will be about 29,204,765 miles.

((29,204,765/86,400)/4.5) will give us an orbital velocity of about 75.115 miles per second. I interpret this to mean that the probable Mass of the orbited object is about 1.2137 as Massive as our Sun. Reverse means our Sun should be about 1.2137 times more Massive that the orbited object. This does not take into account any unusual contribution by a binary star system.
jjw