https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/newfound-ablating-exoplanets-could-reveal-alien-geology/

Move over, Icarus. Six newly discovered exoplanets have been discovered flying so close to their host stars that they are literally evaporating—creating a ring of debris. The discovery of the planets, published today in three separate papers in Nature Astronomy, were identified using a new technique that first looked for that ring of debris. It is thus an efficient method to find small planets orbiting extremely close to their star, which have long eluded detection. In addition, follow-up studies should allow astronomers to probe the geology of these "ablating" worlds and better understand how such planets form and evolve—perhaps even shedding light on the oddities within our own solar system.

In 2009 Carole Haswell, an astronomer at the Open University in England, observed the exoplanet Wasp-12b—a Jupiter-like world that orbits its host star so tightly a year there lasts just 26 hours—when she noticed something odd about its parent star. The hot, outer layers of its atmosphere known as the chromosphere appeared to be missing. And she had an inkling that the star's close-in planet just might be the culprit. At the time, astronomers knew that this world was so hot that the outer reaches of its atmosphere were effectively boiling off into space. "They're just too close to the fire," says David Grinspoon, a scientist[if he's at the Planetary Science Institute can we just describe him as a "scientist at"?] at the Planetary Science Institute who was not involved in the study. "It's like you're roasting your marshmallow and you put it too close to the fire—and poof!" Haswell hypothesized that the resulting trail of gas from the planet absorbed the same wavelengths of light that the star's chromosphere emits, making it appear dark.