A candidate giant planet imaged in the habitable zone of α Cen A
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Hope it has some interesting moons.
So not exactly cozy. I'm not sure what the other measurements mean.
A ball of foamed rock the size of a planet is an amusing thought but I have to assume that's physically impossible.
But what would make it larger is if it was warmer. The radius of a planet like jupiter scales to the 1.6th power of it's temperature. Jupiter is actually slowly shrinking in size as the primordial heat of its formation is radiated away.
This one presumably doesn't have a surface either, yet an earlier commenter spoke of surface gravity. Doesn't it surprise you in the slightest that two planets of the same size could have gravity that differs by such a wide margin?
Surface gravity in this case would be the visible radius - the same way we talk about the surface gravity of the sun, and mean the photosphere.
If you take a look at the linked PDF you'll see that the "Earth" portion of that term is a subscript, so it reads "90-150 Earth masses."
Radial velocity, how quickly a planet moves “back and forth towards an observer” as it revolved about its star [1]. Its amplitude suggests planetary mass, its spectral shape orbital eccentricity.
Still, getting there with something like David Kipping’s proposed TARS propulsion system (a solar-powered launcher that can fling tiny probes at ~40 km/s) we’d be looking at 30,000+ years to reach the star system. It’s a step forward, but for now, our best hope is to keep watching. Until someone develops fusion propulsion…
It'd be easy to have a world covered in ice with underwater oceans kept liquid by volcanic vents.
Maybe there is. More likely, there isn't.
G * (120 Earth masses) / (radius of Jupiter ^ 2)
Unfortunately that "surface" is gaseous…
… or it has a massive shell that is hollow inside /s.
Do any of the other measurements suggest anything about the nature of the surface?
aren't we all? /?
> nature of the surface?
so Jupiter is 317.8 M⊕, this thing is around 80-150, but ... Saturn is right there at 80 ... so unlikely to have a solid surface, but likely has a rocky core, and wild winds at this temperature. (Saturn's average temp is -178C, -138C "surface", and this candidate seems to have -48C.)
https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03814v1/MR_relation.jpg
It seems that all of this is based on 2 data points, and they only provide some examples that are consistent with that, but the models are also very low-confidence (as we don't have a lot of data about cold and small orbiting things - as they are hard to detect).
see section 5.2 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03814v1#S5
but also consistent with the data is that it has ring(s):
Alternate explanations for the F1550C brightness include (1) a knot of exozodiacal emission; or (2) a smaller planet with a circumplanetary ring.
>aren't we all? /?
Offtopic, but such an interesting civilization where the keepers of knowledges seem to relate to this statement so much, innit?
Very Zen or is it just the overwork? Maybe it's a thing installed in our childhoods so that we would not struggle for power. (I certainly remember acquiring this manner of speaking based on fundamental self-deprecation around 5th grade, some other kids not acquiring it, and then 10y later we'd have mutually incomprehensible life scenarios.)
While kinds of dark humor other than "the falsity and futility of my own existence, amirite?" don't quite resonate with people as much, for whatever reason.
Bring on the ion thruster visitor spacecraft!
[0] https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2021/10/06/assessing-the-obe...