This exoplanet could be slowly evaporating until there?s nothing left

Exoplanet with a tail of dust and gas baffles astronomers

In a system 1,500 light years away from us, there may be a world so hot that its surface could have started evaporating, forming a tail of gas and dust escaping into space. Worlds end usually because their parent stars consume them, or because they collide into another planet or heavenly bodies like?asteroids. But an evaporating planet that's dying an extremely slow death is something new to scientists.

Scientists identified the existence of the curious planet from the strange way its dusty tail affects the light coming from its star, as detected by?NASA's Kepler telescope.?Data from Kepler suggests that the planet is a?Mercury-size world orbiting a sun smaller and cooler than ours. It's so close to its star that it makes a complete orbit in less than 16 Earth hours, giving it an infernal surface temperature of 3,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Think of it as a world made of magma with a tail of dust, similar to a?comet.

Just the fact that Kepler was able to identify something as small as Mercury located thousands of light years away indicates that we're getting better at?exoplanet hunting. However, more research is needed to confirm whether what was discovered is actually a dying planet or something else. If it's truly the former, then it still has roughly 200 million years left before it completely vanishes.

[Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech]

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This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

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