But hang on. It takes a long, long time to strip a planet of hydrogen. Billions of years! So, if what these astronomers were supposing is true, maybe, just maybe, GJ 436b is still losing hydrogen now.

This is Gliese 436b, a planet just 30 light-years away. One of the strangest alien worlds ever discovered is a planet with vast platforms of burning ice.

An odd planet the size of Neptune, made mostly of hot, solid water, has been discovered orbiting a nearby star and offers evidence that other planets may be covered with oceans, European ...

Its name is Gliese 436 b. As interesting as planets made of boiling ice or diamond are, nothing trumps dreams of paradisiacal alien Edens. As I said, Wilhelm Gliese isn’t an especially well ...

A hot snowball sounds as contradictory as a frosty forest fire, but European astronomers think they’ve found one orbiting a dwarf star about 33 light-years from Earth. The strange planet, GJ 436 ...

The planet GJ 436b, aka Gliese 436b, which lies roughly 30 light-years away, is known as a “warm Neptune” – it sits so close to its star that its “year” is just 2.64 days, ...

GJ 436b is located 33 light-years away in the constellationLeo, the Lion. The planet rides in a tight, 2.64-day orbit around its small star,an "M-dwarf" class star that is much cooler than our sun.

GJ 436b, located about 33 light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo, is a kind of world known as a warm Neptune.Such planets, at about 10 to 20 times the mass of Earth, are about the mass of ...

This artist's impression shows exoplanet GJ 436b, which is surrounded by a massive gas cloud that streams behind the planet like a comet's tail for millions of miles.

Gliese 436 b is a Neptune-sized planet that orbits a red dwarf known as Gliese 436. Image: NASA. This unusual world is only 33 light-years away from Earth. Image: NASA.

The strange, cometlike planet, known as GJ 436b, is orbiting a red dwarf star and is about 22 times as massive as Earth. Astronomers detected the giant gas cloud around the planet using NASA's ...