Nearby exoplanet has grown a tail 44 times longer than Earth — and it's acting like a giant 'stellar windsock'

An Artist's impression of a giant tail of blue gas being blown away from an exoplanet with a sun-like star in the background.

An alien world near Earth is being trailed by a gigantic tail, stretching longer than 40 Earths as it closely circles its home star. The enormous structure, which is made up of gas leaking from the exoplanet's atmosphere, is being blown by stellar winds like a giant "windsock," experts say.

The exoplanet, WASP-69 b, is a gas giant. It's around the same size as Jupiter but less than a third as massive, and orbits a main sequence star roughly 160 light-years from Earth. It is very close to its star, completing a single trip around the alien sun every 3.9 days.