Astronomers from The Open University, the Universities of Warwick and Sheffield have made observations of a small rocky world orbiting a distant star about 1500 light years away from Earth. The observations can help reveal the chemical makeup of the planet and increase our understanding of how planets, including ours, were formed. The planet, named 'KIC 1255 b', is slowly boiling away under intense heat of its sun, with its outer layers continuously destroyed and creating a comet-like dust tail following the planet in its orbit. The ULTRACAM measurements were the most sensitive yet made, and revealed that the dust cloud grows and shrinks in size seemingly at random, offering a unique chance to pin down the mechanism responsible for this unusual behaviour.