In a far-off corner of the Milky Way, astronomers today revealed what looks like a cosmic coming-of-age: a young “rogue planet” devouring the gas and dust around it at breakneck speed. The object, named Cha 1107-7626, lies about 620 light-years from Earth in the Chamaeleon constellation—and it’s rewriting what we thought planets could do.
This is not a planet drifting in peaceful solitude. Observations show it’s undergoing a dramatic growth spurt, ingesting surrounding material at rates unlike anything seen before in a free-floating object. In August, Cha 1107-7626 is estimated to have eaten six billion tons of gas and dust each second—a rate nearly eight times faster than a few months ago.
What makes this especially striking is that such violent accretion is more typical of newborn stars, not planets. According to Víctor Almendros-Abad, lead author on the study, this suggests the physical mechanisms that drive star formation might also operate on a planetary scale. “The outburst we detected is extraordinary … it reveals that the same physical processes driving star formation can also occur on a planetary scale,” he said.
Cha 1107-7626 has a mass estimated at five to ten times Jupiter, putting it within the realm of gas giants—but it seems to straddle categories. It is about 1 to 2 million years old, extremely young in cosmic time. The international team used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to track the outburst.
Co-author Belinda Damian of St Andrews University added, “We usually tend to think of planets as quiet and stable,” but now “we see that these objects can be dynamic just like stars in their nascent stages. It blurs the line between stars and planets.”
Astronomers are especially intrigued by the mechanism behind this accretion. The research suggests strong magnetic fields may be channeling infalling gas from a disk toward the forming planet—something previously only confidently observed in stars. But Cha 1107-7626 is not expected to grow much more; researchers believe it is nearing its final mass.
This discovery raises big questions about how rogue planets form. Do they emerge like stars, via collapse of a molecular cloud, or do they form in a disk and later get ejected from their systems? Cha 1107-7626 may hint at a hybrid route.
While this is happening 620 light years away, the implications reach home. The object challenges our definitions of planet and star, suggesting nature works across a spectrum rather than neat categories. And as telescopes get sharper and surveys deeper, we may find more of these wild, hungry worlds out in the dark.
In a universe where even a planet can feast like a star, we’re reminded how much we still don’t know. What looked like a lonely wanderer may in fact be in the throes of transformation—and astronomers are watching its first gasp of life.
Source: Reuters
