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A Puffed-Up Extrasolar Planet
Maggie McKee writes, "New Scientist Space reports astronomers have found a planet less dense than a wine cork and 38% larger than Jupiter. It circles a star about 450 light years from Earth. A similarly bloated planet has been found before (HD 209458b), so these puffed-up planets may be quite common. But no one knows how they got so swollen. One possibility is 'that some poorly understood mechanism has separated hydrogen and helium in each planet.'"
Nope. If you take a small number of samples from a very large and diverse population, the odds are actually very high that several of the very uncommon results (e.g. planet types) will be highly overrepresented. It's a variation on "there are so many extremely unlikely things which can happen that it's extremely likely that a few of them will happen."
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.