Styrofoam planet .. Kepler telescope spots

 researchers say.

More than 400 planets have now been found orbiting other stars, but Earth-sized planets – which may be the best habitats for life – have remained elusive.

NASA's orbiting Kepler telescope is designed to find them. It has been scrutinising 100,000 stars since April 2009, searching for telltale dips in starlight created when planets pass in front of their host stars.

A giant planet with the density of Styrofoam is one of a clutch of new exoplanets discovered by NASA's Kepler telescope. The planets are too hot to support life as we know it, but the discoveries, made during the telescope's first few weeks of operation, suggest Kepler is on the right track to find Earth's twins

How Many Times Would Earth Fit Inside Jupiter?

During its first six weeks of observations, it found five new planets. All are giants – four are heavier than Jupiter and one is about as massive as Neptune. They all orbit their host stars so closely that their surfaces are hotter than molten lava. "Looking at them might be like looking at a blast furnace," says lead scientist William Borucki, who presented the results on Monday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC.



In comparison to Earth, the planet Jupiter is more than 11 times larger than Earth’s diameter. Jupiter’s diameter is 141,700 kilometres and Earth’s diameter is only 12,756 kilometres, therefore it is easy to tell that Jupiter is the larger planet. In addition to this, you could roughly fit Earth into Jupiter 1,000 times. This demonstrates just how huge Jupiter as a planet really is.

Jupiter is the biggest planet in the solar system and has 63 satellites of its own, four of these being planet-size moons. These moons are called lo, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. As a collective, these four large moons are known as the Galilean satellites.

Not only is Jupiter bigger in size than the Earth, it also has an enormous magnetic field which is nearly 20,000 times as powerful as Earth’s. It is the fifth planet from the Sun and it contains more matter than all the other planets combined.

The composition of Jupiter’s atmosphere is somewhat similar to that of the sun's. It is made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. Jupiter is also the fourth brightest object in the sky. It comes after the Sun, the Moon and the planet Venus. 

The main feature of Jupiter is what is known as the Giant Red Spot (GRS). This is an area in the planet’s atmosphere which, as the name suggests, is the colour red. This giant red spinning storm has been observed for over 300 years. Even in this spot, the Earth could fit inside over two times, which again demonstrates the enormity of Jupiter in comparison to Earth. If Jupiter was in fact approximately 80 times more massive, it would be a star, rather than a planet.