A new paper by Shreyas Vissapragada and colleagues reports a new technique for detecting material boiling off hot-Jupiter exoplanets. The idea is that helium atoms in escaping material should be strong absorbers of light at the wavelength of 1083.3 nm, one of the transitions of neutral helium. Thus, if one records a transit in an ultra-narrow-band filter around that wavelength, the planet should look bigger and so the transit should be deeper.

Vissapragada et al pointed the 200-inch Hale Telescope at a transit of WASP-69b. Here’s the result:

The blue line is the usual transit depth expected in continuum light. The data and fitted red line are the transit observed in the 1083.3-nm helium line. The authors compute that the extra depth of the transit implies that 30 million kilos of material is evaporating off the planet each second, as a result of stellar irradiation. This sounds a lot, but adds up to only a few percent of the planet’s mass over the host star’s lifetime.