Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2026

9 ASTRO PUBLISHING JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2026 A stronomers have found an intense ‘growth spurt’ in a rogue planet –– a planet that doesn’t orbit a star. Observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) reveal that this free-float- ing planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at a rate of six billion tonnes a second, the strongest ever found for a planet of any kind. This video summarises the discovery. [ESO] The Astrophysical Journal Letters , was made with the X-shooter spectrograph on ESO’s VLT, located in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The team also used data from the James Webb Space Telescope, operated by the US, European and Canadian space agencies, and archival data from the SINFONI spectrograph on ESO's VLT. “The origin of rogue planets remains an open question: are they the lowest-mass ob- jects formed like stars, or giant planets ejected from their birth systems?” asks co-author Aleks Scholz, an astronomer at the University of St An- drews, United Kingdom. The findings indicate that at least some rogue planets may share a similar formation path to stars since similar bursts of accretion have been spot- ted in young stars before. As co-author Belinda Damian, also an astronomer at the University of St Andrews, explains: “This discovery blurs the line between stars and planets and gives us a sneak peek into the earliest formation periods of rogue planets.” By comparing the light emitted before and during the burst, astronomers gathered clues https://www.eso.org/public/unitedkingdom/videos/eso2516a/