The Largest Known Planet

  The Earth is big, Uranus is big, and Jupiter is definitely big. But WASP-17b is a BIG, a BIGGER, in fact THE BIGGEST known planet.

  WASP-17b which orbits the star WASP-17 is an exoplanet that was discovered by a team of researchers led by David Anderson. Due to the involvement of the SuperWASP in WASP-17b’s discovery , and the fact that this is the 17th planet SuperWASP discovered it received it’s name, while the “b” in WASP-17b is to differentiate it from it’s parent star WASP-17.

  WASP-17b is special in many traits, the most known being the largest known planet. Other are that it’s almost twice as large as Jupiter despite being at half of it’s mass, it’s radius which is about 1.5 to 2 times that of Jupiter, it’s immensely low density which is between 0.08 and 0.19 g/cm cubed, it’s being the first planet discovered to have a retrograde orbit, between others.

  The following image compares the size of WASP-17b to the size of Jupiter:

Image via Wikipedia