Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2026 ARABIC VERSION

A 8 ASTROPUBLISHING Rogue planet found growing at record rate byESO BárbaraFerreira stronomers haveidentified an enormous ‘growth spurt’ inaso-calledrogueplanet. Unlike the planets in our Solar Sys- tem, these objects do not orbitstars, free-floating on their own in- stead. The new observations, made with the European Southern Obser- vatory’sVeryLargeTelescope(ESO’s VLT), reveal that this free-floating planet is eating up gas and dustfrom its surroundings at a rate of six billion tonnes a second. This is the strongest growthrate everrecordedforarogueplanet,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 freelyfloatinginspacecanbeexcit- 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 planetisstillformingandisfedby a surrounding disc of gas and dust. Thismaterialconstantlyfallsonto the free-floating planet, a process known as accretion. However, the team led by Almendros-Abad has now found that the rate at which theyoungplanetisaccretingisnot steady. y August 2025, the planet was ac- creting about eight times faster thanjustafewmonthsbefore,ata rate of six billion tonnes persec- ond! “Thisisthestrongestaccretion episode ever recorded for a plane- tary-massobject,” saysAlmendros- Abad.Thediscovery,publishedin