Rogue Planet Found Growing at Record Rate | European Southern Observatory

Rogue Planet Found Growing at Record Rate | European Southern Observatory

Astronomers have found an intense ‘growth spurt’ in a rogue planet––a planet that does not orbit a star. Observations with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (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, the strongest ever found for a planet of any kind. This video summarizes the discovery.  

The newly studied object, with 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.

By August 2025, the planet was accreting about eight times faster than just a few months before, at a rate of six billion tonnes per second! “This is the strongest accretion episode ever recorded for a planetary-mass object,” says Almendros-Abad. The discovery, published today in 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 objects formed like stars, or giant planets ejected from their birth systems?” asks co-author Aleks Scholz, an astronomer at the University of St Andrews, United Kingdom. The findings indicate that rogue planets may share a similar formation path to stars since similar bursts of accretion have been spotted 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.”

Credit: ESO
Directed by: Angelos Tsaousis and Martin Wallner
Editing: Angelos Tsaousis
Written by: Malika Nora Duffek
Footage and photos: ESO, Luis Calçada, Martin Kornmesser, Angelos Tsaousis, Christoph Malin, Digitized Sky Survey 2, Meingast et al.
Scientific consultant: Paola Amico, Mariya Lyubenova
Based on research by: V. Almendros-Abad et al., ApJL
Release Date: Oct. 2, 2025

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