Red Dwarf Burns Off Planet's Hydrogen Giving It Massive Comet-Like Tail
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 - 12:30
in Astronomy & Space
A giant cloud escaping from a warm, Neptune-mass exoplanet is reported in this week's Nature. Depicted in an image by Mark Garlick and issued by the University of Warwick, it has been suggested that low-mass exoplanets orbiting close to their parent stars could have had some fraction of their atmospheres 'burnt off' by extreme irradiation from the star, but confident measures of such losses have been lacking until now.