Infant rogue planet 620 light-years away growing by 6 billion tonnes per second

Scientists are shocked to see a planet chowing on six billion tons of gas and dust each second, an event that has been going on for a couple of months. The so-called rogue planet is witnessing an extreme and unprecedented "growth spurt", proving that planets are not docile cosmic objects. The new observations were made by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT). This free-floating planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at an astounding rate, providing new insights into the formation of planets. Cha 1107-7626 is around five to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, and lives 620 light-years away in the constellation of Chamaeleon. The planet is being fed by a circumplanetary disk of gas and dust, which constantly falls into it. The process, known as accretion, witnessed a sudden acceleration by August 2025 in Cha 1107-7626. It sped up by eight times within a few months, leading it to its current rate of six billion tons per second. The discovery was published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

This planet is still forming, giving scientists a peek into how such large bodies develop. "We’ve caught this newborn rogue planet in the act of gobbling up stuff at a furious pace,” said Johns Hopkins University’s Professor Ray Jayawardhana. Lead author of the study, Víctor Almendros-Abad, said that this discovery proves that "planets are not quiet and stable worlds". An astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo and National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Italy, Almendros-Abad added, “This is the strongest accretion episode ever recorded for a planetary-mass object."

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But this accretion is not stable. As pointed out above, the researchers noted that the speed of gulping down material changed vastly over a few months. "We have captured a rare glimpse into the baby phase of isolated objects not much heftier than Jupiter. Their infancy appears to be much more tumultuous than we had realised," Jayawardhana said. Besides ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), located in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the team also used data from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and archival data from the SINFONI spectrograph on VLT.

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Rogue planet acting like a star

Witnessing a rogue planet acting like a star has raised questions about how they are different from each other. "The origin of rogue planets remains an open question: are they the lowest-mass objects formed like stars, or giant planets ejected from their birth systems?" co-author Aleks Scholz, an astronomer at the University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, said. The findings prove that some rogue planets are formed in a similar manner as stars, since both witness bursts of accretion.

“This discovery blurs the line between stars and planets and gives us a sneak peek into the earliest formation periods of rogue planets,” said Dr Belinda Damian, an astronomer at the University of St Andrews. Another thing that stumped researchers was the presence of water vapour in the disk around the planet during the accretion episode, but not after it. This phenomenon had been spotted in stars but never in a planet. “We’re struck by quite how much the infancy of free-floating planetary-mass objects resembles that of stars like the Sun,” Professor Jayawardhana said.