The free-floating object is swallowing surrounding material at an astonishing, record-breaking pace.
Rogue planets live by their own rules, freely floating through the cosmos without being bound to a star. With no stellar supervision, those isolated planetary bodies can often behave in unusual ways. Astronomers discovered a rogue planet experiencing a rather unusual growth spurt, bingeing on its surrounding gas and dust at an unprecedented rate.
The rogue planet is located approximately 620 light-years away in the Chameleon constellation. It’s still in its early formation process and is feeding off a surrounding disc of gas and dust, the leftovers from its birthing process. Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope, the team of scientists behind the recent discovery revealed that the planet, officially named Cha 1107-7626, is eating the material at a record-breaking rate of 6 billion tons per second.
The discovery is detailed in a paper published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, detailing the strongest growth rate ever observed in any planetary body.
