Venus is leaking carbon and oxygen, and scientists aren't totally sure why

An abundance of gases, including carbon and oxygen, are being stripped away from Venus' atmosphere, according to flyby data from Europe's BepiColombo space probe.

Rather, sunlight battering on the amber-hued orb charges up its atmospheric atoms, which then create electric currents that produce an unstable, sunlight-dependent magnetosphere.

Charged particles, or ions, appeared to be escaping the planet due to sunlight accelerating molecules in the atmosphere to extremely high speeds.

"These are heavy ions that are usually slow moving, so we are still trying to understand the mechanisms that are at play," Lina Hadid, a researcher at the Plasma Physics Laboratory in France who led the new analysis, said in a statement.

Scientists previously knew tiny amounts of oxygen lofted in Venus' night-side and, last November, a different team of researchers detected the molecule on the planet's day-side too.

Investigating the loss of these molecules and their escape mechanisms "is crucial to understand how the planet's atmosphere has evolved and how it has lost all its water," study co-author Dominique Delcourt, who is also a researcher at the Plasma Physics Laboratory, said in the same statement.