Kepler Finds Five More Exoplanets 102
Arvisp was one of several readers to send news of five new exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. In addition to the new "hot Jupiters" — the easiest targets to find — Kepler's early data has turned up some oddities, including something that is too hot to be a planet and too small to be a star. And one of the exoplanets is so fluffy that "it has the density of Styrofoam." The real news is that Kepler works as designed, and the scientists running it are fully confident that it will find Earth-like planets in some star's habitable zone, if they are out there to be found. Here is NASA's press release.
density of Styrofoam (Score:2, Informative)
IIRC the density of the planet is not the same throughout. If that is the case, the comparison is pretty misleading. It could very well be a rocy core with a very thick layer of some light gas.