Astronomers have discovered an unusual exoplanet with a long “tail” of gas trailing behind it, resembling a giant comet. According to a recent NASA article about the discovery, the said planet WASP-69bIt is constantly losing its atmosphere consisting of hydrogen and helium particles. These gases are stretched by a cloud, forming a tail under the influence of strong stellar radiation.

WASP-69 b is a “hot Jupiter,” meaning it is a gas giant that has about the same mass as Jupiter but orbits a much shorter distance around its star in the constellation Aquarius (about 164 light-years from Earth). This causes the temperature on the planet’s surface to become much higher.

“Strong stellar winds can pull this stream into a tail coming from behind the planet,” lead author of the study, University of California astrophysicist Dakota Tyler, told NASA in an interview.

Tyler and his colleagues found that the exoplanet is losing about 200,000 tons of gas per second. While this may seem like a lot, it’s on a planetary scale. Every billion years, the planet loses a mass equivalent to that of Earth, meaning it is unlikely to ever run out of gas in its atmosphere (WASP-69 b is about 90 times more massive than Earth).

The exoplanet’s tail is surprisingly long, stretching more than 7.5 radii behind it, or some 350,000 miles; This is approximately 1.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. But as the star’s radiation changes, the size and shape of WASP-69 b’s unusual plume may also change, and astronomers are just beginning to understand this unusual phenomenon.

“The study of extragalactic atmospheres is important for understanding the physical mechanisms that shape the populations of nearby planets,” says the study published in The Astrophysical Journal.