{"id":223285,"date":"2025-10-12T08:03:32","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T13:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/six-billion-tonnes-a-second-rogue-planet-found-growing-at-record-rate"},"modified":"2025-10-12T08:03:32","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T13:03:32","slug":"six-billion-tonnes-a-second-rogue-planet-found-growing-at-record-rate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/six-billion-tonnes-a-second-rogue-planet-found-growing-at-record-rate","title":{"rendered":"Six billion tonnes a second: Rogue planet found growing at record rate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/six-billion-tonnes-a-second-rogue-planet-found-growing-at-record-rate.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Astronomers have identified an enormous \u2018growth spurt\u2019 in a so-called rogue planet. Unlike the planets in our Solar System, these objects do not orbit stars, free-floating on their own instead. The new observations, made with the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (ESO\u2019s VLT), reveal that this free-floating planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at a rate of six billion tonnes a second. This is the strongest growth rate ever recorded for a rogue planet, or a planet of any kind, providing valuable insights into how they form and grow.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>People may think of planets as quiet and stable worlds, but with this discovery we see that planetary-mass objects freely floating in space can be exciting places<\/em>,\u201d says V\u00edctor Almendros-Abad, an astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo, National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Italy and lead author of the new study.<\/p>\n<p>The newly studied object, which has a mass five to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, is located about 620 light-years away in the constellation Chamaeleon. Officially named Cha 1107\u20137626, this rogue planet is still forming and is fed by a surrounding disc of gas and dust. This material constantly falls onto the free-floating planet, a process known as accretion. However, the team led by Almendros-Abad has now found that the rate at which the young planet is accreting is not steady.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers have identified an enormous \u2018growth spurt\u2019 in a so-called rogue planet. Unlike the planets in our Solar System, these objects do not orbit stars, free-floating on their own instead. The new observations, made with the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope (ESO\u2019s VLT), reveal that this free-floating planet is eating up gas and dust [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1506,219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}