The universe is filled with giant planets but there is one that trumps all.
Earth is of course the only planet in our Solar System that sustains intelligent life, but it is one of the smallest, behind only Mercury, Venus, and Mars.
The verdict is out for further afield, as billions of planets scattered across the known universe could well harbour life.
Many of these planets are huge, much bigger than anything we know in our Solar System.
This is even though ours plays hosts to some colossuses, like Saturn and Jupiter, great hulks of planets filled with toxic gas.
There is one planet that goes one bigger, one that makes Jupiter look like a magnet on a fridge, the one known as ROXs 42Bb.
Jupiter is by a country mile the biggest planet in our Solar System but is dwarfed by ROXs 42Bb (Image: GETTY)
Things aren’t as clear cut with measuring ROXs 42Bb for the planet is classed by NASA as a directly “imagined planetary-mass companion” to the binary M star ROXs 42B.
A likely member of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, its existence was discovered and announced on October 17, 2013, by researchers at the University of Toronto.
Like Jupiter, it is a gas giant and is some 500 light-years from Earth, has a radius estimated to be 1.12 times that of Jupiter’s and a mass of around nine Jupiters — meaning you could easily fit nine Jupiters inside ROXs 42Bb.
To put its size into perspective, it is so big that its gravitational pull holds 80 confirmed moons, though the true number may be much higher.
Further to this, Jupiter has a radius of 69,911km, making it approximately 11 times wider than the Earth’s 6,371km, so in the context of ROXs 42Bb, if Earth were the size of a 20p coin, Jupiter would be the same size as a football.