The scientists also announced that Pluto has an ion tail, the result of its atmosphere escaping and ionizing when its nitrogen interacts with photons from the sun.
Astronomers have found several other examples of worlds in the process of being devoured by their stars, or being heated up so much that their atmosphere escapes into space, forming a comet-like tail.
The concentration is low and fairly constant despite the continuous production of new helium because most helium in the Earth's atmosphere escapes into space by several processes.
We also found the transition in the shape of "atmospheric escape region", where the atmosphere can escape from the planet with the atmospheric pressure, as well as in the mass of the atmospheric loss.
The thought was that Pluto's atmosphere was escaping like a comet, but it is actually escaping at a rate much more like Earth's atmosphere".
Researcher Fran Bagenal said that based on models and "a pretty good guess", she expects Pluto's atmosphere is escaping at a rate of about 500 tons per hour, hundreds of times faster than the escape of Mars's atmosphere.
The lightest ones (such as hydrogen and helium) that might have formed the first, or primordial, atmosphere probably escaped into outer space.
Both groups are proposing similar spacecraft to orbit Mars and study why the planet's thin atmosphere is escaping into space.
Atmospheres of some planetary bodies, such as Mercury, are almost nonexistent, as the primordial atmosphere has escaped the relatively low gravitational attraction of the planet and has been released into space.
It is confirmation that a substantial portion of the planet's original atmosphere has escaped into space.
