Astronomers have announced, that “‘cotton-candy-like’ exoplanets called super-puffs may actually have rings, according to new research published in The Astronomical Journal by Carnegie’s Anthony Piro and Caltech’s Shreyas Vissapragada.” Apparently, the one time astronomers decided to give something an awesome name and description, it is food- and fashion-related. 

So what is a ‘super-puff’? If you try googling, you will learn it is one of the big puffy quilted jackets made popular by Eddie Bauer and Lululemon. If you google ‘super-puff planet’, you’ll find out they are planets whose size has been measured by studying how they transit their host star, and whose mass has been measured from how they gravitationally interact with their stars, and according to these combined measurements, have disturbingly low densities. I actually remember the first one being announced back in 2014, and talking to other folks about how the announced 0.1 grams per cubic centimeter masses being found simply made no sense. As our earlier quote implies, this is a bit like making a planet the density of cotton candy. 

For some reason, we didn’t immediately jump to the thought “but what if these worlds have rings that make it seem like they are way bigger than they are and distort our measurements?” Well, while this didn’t occur to me or the speaker I remember listening to, it did occur to Piro and Vissapragada who have calculated that some but not all of the super puffs observed could be explained with familiar ring systems, and that with high enough quality observations, we may be able to observe the difference between a ringed world, and puffed-out world. Unfortunately, we’re going to need to wait for JWST to make those observations. For now, it’s comforting to know that these worlds have down-to-Earth – or at least down-to-Saturn – explanation. 

To learn more about the ringed cotton candy planets, head to:

What If Mysterious “Cotton Candy” Planets Actually Sport Rings? (Carnegie Science)