A fleeting visit of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Venus has revealed surprising insights into how gases are stripped away from the upper layers of the planet's atmosphere.

Detections in a previously unexplored region of Venus's magnetic environment show that carbon and oxygen are being accelerated to speeds where they can escape the planet's gravitational pull.

Lina Hadid, CNRS researcher at the Plasma Physics Laboratory (LPP) and lead author of the study said, "This is the first time that positively charged carbon ions have been observed escaping from Venus's atmosphere. These are heavy ions that are usually slow moving, so we are still trying to understand the mechanisms that are at play. It may be that an electrostatic 'wind' is lifting them away from the planet, or they could be accelerated through centrifugal processes."