Astronomers have discovered a “rogue” planet swallowing gas and dust at record speed, but say they can’t explain its mysterious behavior.
Many rogue planets have been discovered over the years, floating freely in space without orbiting a star, but this planet, known as Cha 1107-7626, appears to be the fastest growing floating planet ever discovered, growing at a peak velocity of 6.6 billion tons (6 billion metric tons) per second, according to observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the James Webb Space Telescope in Chile. It is said that it devours the substances of (JWST).
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“Our main motivation for studying these types of objects is to understand whether these objects are former planets ejected from planetary systems, or whether they formed ‘orphaned’ from the gravitational collapse of star-like molecular cloud material,” study lead author Victor Almendros Abbado, an astronomer at Italy’s Palermo Observatory, told Live Science in an email.
The researchers discovered “accretion bursts,” which occur when a planet suddenly pulls in large amounts of material from a surrounding disk of gas or dust. Although Cha 1107-7626 is constantly accreting from this source material, studies have shown that the accretion rate is not stable. In fact, in August 2025, the planet was accreting eight times faster than a few months earlier.
Accretion outbursts suggest that rogue worlds may be like young stars, as such sudden outbursts of feeding have been observed in stars. But rogue planets are much smaller than stars, so it’s unclear where their formation paths diverge.
“Accretion bursts have been known for a long time. They were first discovered in the late 1930s, long before it became clear what we were witnessing,” study co-author Alexander Scholz, a professor of astrophysics at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told Live Science via email. “Such events are now understood to play an important role in star assembly, and by heating gas and dust nebulae around young stars, they can also shape the environment in which planetary systems form.
“Essences of such explosions may be found in the chemistry of meteorites in our solar system,” Scholz continued. “It is not clear whether bursts occur in all young stars or what causes them. The discovery of a similar phenomenon in planetary-mass objects may provide clues that there is a universal mechanism behind accretion bursts. In this sense, our findings will have wider implications.”
Scientists have discovered more rogue planets in recent years. These include notable discoveries by JWST, which discovered more than 500 of these planets in trapezoid-shaped locations within the Orion Nebula, a giant gas cloud famous for the birth of stars.
But rogue planets remain difficult to detect because they glow in the infrared (radiant energy) and are best seen with large telescopes such as JWST and VLT, Almendros-Abad said. Scientists hope that VLT and JWST will be able to observe more of these rogue planets and learn whether they are forming like stars or planets. Almendros Abad pointed out that the accretion parallel between stars and planets is not fully understood.
“One of the next steps is to understand how common these kinds of events are on rogue planets,” he said. “This will tell us how important [accretion events] It is in the process of evolution. ”
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