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A bloated alien world orbiting a star on the fringes of the Milky Way has baffled astronomers, who believe it is the largest planet discovered.
At 16 times the diameter of the Earth, the planet dwarfs the celestial bodies in our solar system, even the gas giant Jupiter, which is more than 140,000km across at the equator.
Early measurements of the planet suggest it is about 1.4 times the size of Jupiter, but unusually has a density just one quarter that of water.
“We could be looking at an entirely new class of planets,” said Gaspar Bakos, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “It’s lighter than a giant ball of cork.”
The planet, named Hat-P-1, orbits a pair of stars 450 light years away in a constellation called Lacerta.
