Discovery of a disintegrating planet with cometlike tail

Watch EarthSky’s founder Deborah Byrd interview Marc Hon of MIT, the lead author of the new study.

• Astronomers have discovered a planet that’s rapidly disintegrating, producing a comet-like tail.
• The small and rocky lava world sheds an amount of material equivalent to the mass of Mount Everest every 30.5 hours.
• The long tail stretches some 9 million kilometers long, or roughly half of the planet’s entire orbit.

MIT published this original article on April 22, 2025.