Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2026

8 ASTRO PUBLISHING JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2026 A stronomers have identified an enormous ‘growth spurt’ in a so-called rogue planet. Unlike the planets in our Solar Sys- tem, these objects do not orbit stars, free-floating on their own in- stead. The new observations, made with the European Southern Obser- vatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s 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. “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 excit- Rogue planet found growing at record rate by ESO Bárbara Ferreira T he background illustration shows Cha 1107-7626. Located about 620 light-years away, this rogue planet is about 5-10 times more massive than Jupiter and doesn’t orbit a star. It is eating up material from a disc around it and, using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have discovered that it is now doing so at a rate of six billion tonnes per second –– the fastest ever found for any kind of planet. The team suspects that strong magnetic fields could be funnelling material towards the planet, something only seen in stars. [ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser] ing places,” says Víctor Almendros- Abad, an astronomer at the Astro- nomical Observatory of Palermo, National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Italy and lead author of the new study. The newly studied ob- ject, 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 1107-7626, 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. y August 2025, the planet was ac- creting about eight times faster than just a few months before, at a rate of six billion tonnes per sec- ond! “This is the strongest accretion episode ever recorded for a plane- tary-mass object,” says Almendros- Abad. The discovery, published in