incredible pace—about six billion tons every single second.
This is the fastest growth ever seen in a planet, and it’s giving scientists new clues about how such lonely worlds are born.
Unlike the planets in our solar system, rogue planets don’t circle around a star. Instead, they drift freely through space.
The newly studied object, officially called Cha 1107-7626, sits about 620 light-years away in the constellation Chamaeleon.
It is massive—five to ten times heavier than Jupiter—and still forming.
What makes this planet so unusual is the way it is growing. It is surrounded by a disk of gas and dust that constantly falls onto the planet, a process known as accretion.
While accretion is common in young stars and planets, the speed at which this planet is feeding is astonishing. In August 2025, astronomers measured its growth rate and found it was eight times faster than only a few months earlier.
“This is the strongest growth episode ever recorded for a planet,” said Víctor Almendros-Abad, lead author of the new study from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy.
The discovery was made using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, with additional data from the James Webb Space Telescope and older observations from another VLT instrument.
By looking at the light given off before and during the burst, researchers learned that magnetic forces seemed to help pull the material in—something previously seen only in stars.
The team also noticed that the chemistry around the planet changed during the growth spurt. Water vapor, for example, was detected only during the burst and not before. Similar changes have been seen in stars, but this is the first time they have been observed in a planet.
These findings blur the line between stars and planets. They suggest that at least some rogue planets might grow in the same way that stars do, rather than being thrown out of a planetary system.
Free-floating planets are hard to spot because they are faint and far away. But upcoming telescopes, like the Extremely Large Telescope being built in Chile, will give astronomers much sharper tools to find more of them. That could reveal whether Cha 1107-7626 is an oddball—or one of many planets going through wild and fiery beginnings.
As ESO astronomer Amelia Bayo put it, “The idea that a planet can behave like a star is awe-inspiring and invites us to wonder what other worlds might be like in their earliest days.”
Source: ESO.
