Poof goes an atmosphere

Blasted by the heat and radiation from its planet’s parent star, the atmosphere of a distant planet is blowing off into space. Astronomers have now detected carbon and oxygen escaping from the upper reaches of the searingly hot planet HD209458b, which orbits its star at just one-eighth the distance that Mercury orbits the sun. This is the first time carbon and oxygen have been found in an extrasolar planet, researchers report in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal Letters.