Story:
A scorched alien planet is flying so close to its parent star that its atmosphere is being swept off it in a glowing tail like some sort of giant comet, NASA announced Thursday.
The existence of the planet and its strange tail, which was suggested in previous studies, was confirmed recently by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. These new observations of the gas giant planet, called HD 209458b, suggest strong winds from its nearby star are blowing the atmosphere off the scorched world and shaping it into a comet-like tail.
“Since 2003 scientists have theorized the lost mass is being pushed back into a tail, and they have even calculated what it looks like,” said astronomer Jeffrey Linsky of the University of Colorado in Boulder, leader of the study. “We think we have the best observational evidence to support that theory. We have measured gas coming off the planet at specific speeds, some coming toward Earth. The most likely interpretation is that we have measured the velocity of material in a tail.”
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/hot-alien-planet-comet-tail-100715.html
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