Yeah, Right, Whatever

Hey, don't blame me. I'm not the one who called it "puffy."

A newly discovered planet has one-quarter the density of water and would float if placed in a bathtub large enough to hold it.

"It's lighter than a ball of cork," said study team leader Gaspar Bakos of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Called HAT-P-1, the planet is about half as massive as Jupiter but about 1.76 times wider—or 24 percent larger than predicted by theory.

... HAT-P-1 is not the first low-density planet found outside our solar system, but it is the largest. HD 209458b, the first transit planet ever discovered, is also swollen and about 20 percent larger than theory predicts.

...It's still unclear what's puffing the planets up. Additional heat must seep into the planets' interiors to cause the swelling, but scientists don't know how this is happening. Simple solar heating by a star would not work, scientists say, or else all hot-Jupiter's would be expanded, not just two.

So... it's being super-heated from the inside... kind of like popcorn... without the explosion.

Hey... you know... there could be a perfectly rational explanation for the puffy planets. I'm thinking a galactic Tex-Mex... or a really big pot of ham and beans.