Rogue planet has a record growth rate of 6.6 billion tons per second

CNN Astronomers have observed a planet that in specific means behaves more like a star including a massive advancement spurt unlike anything witnessed before in a free-floating planet The rogue planet which does not orbit any star is called Cha - and is outside of our solar system light-years from Earth in the Chamaeleon constellation A single light-year or the distance light travels in one year is equal to trillion miles trillion kilometers The planet has a mass five to times that of Jupiter the largest planet in our solar system And it s getting bigger every second according to new research published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters Estimated to be million to million years old Cha - is still forming noted review coauthor Aleks Scholz an astronomer at the University of St Andrews in Scotland It may sound old but astronomically speaking the planet is in its infancy By contrast the planets in our solar system are about billion years old Cha - is surrounded by a disk of gas and dust which constantly falls onto the planet and accumulates during a process that astronomers call accretion But the rate at which the young planet is growing varies the survey authors noted Observations with the European Southern Observatory s Very Large Telescope in Chile s Atacama Desert along with follow-up views conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope indicated that the planet is adding material about eight times faster than a insufficient months earlier and gobbling up gas and dust at a record rate of billion tons billion metric tons per second The unique burst of activity is the strongest rise rate ever recorded for a planet of any kind declared lead examination author V ctor Almendros-Abad an astronomer at the Palermo Astronomical Observatory of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy and is shedding light on the tumultuous formation and evolution of planets We ve caught this newborn rogue planet in the act of gobbling up stuff at a furious pace explained senior coauthor Ray Jayawardhana provost and professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in a declaration Monitoring its behavior over the past sparse months with two of the largest part powerful telescopes on the ground and in space we have captured a rare glimpse into the baby phase of isolated objects not much heftier than Jupiter Their infancy appears to be much more tumultuous than we had realized An unprecedented burst of rise Astronomers first discovered Cha - in and since then they have observed it with different telescopes to learn more about how the infant planet evolves as well as to inquiry its surroundings The research squad observed the planet with Webb in making a clear detection of the surrounding disk Next the researchers studied it using the X-shooter spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope which can capture different wavelengths of light emitted by an object ranging from ultraviolet to near-infrared The observations detected a puzzling event as the planet transitioned from a steady accretion rate in April and May to a burst of increase between June and August I fully expected that this is a short-term event because those are much more common Scholz declared When the burst kept going through July and August I was absolutely stunned Follow-up observations made using the Webb telescope also presented that the chemistry of the disk had changed Water vapor present during the upsurge spurt wasn t in the disk before Webb is the only telescope capable of capturing such detailed changes in the ecosystem for such a faint object Scholz disclosed Prior to this research astronomers had only ever seen the chemistry of a disk change around a star but not around a planet Comparing observations from before and during the event evidenced that magnetic activity seems to be the main driver behind how much gas and dust is falling on the planet a phenomenon typically associated with stars as they grow But the new observations suggest that objects with much less mass than stars the rogue world is less than the mass of our sun can have strong magnetic fields capable of driving the enhancement of the object according to the survey authors A planet that acts like a star The origin of rogue planets remains murky It s manageable they are planets that are kicked out of orbit around stars due to the gravitational influence of other objects Or perhaps they are the lowest-mass objects that happen to form like stars For Cha - astronomers revealed they think it s the latter This object greater part likely formed in a way similar to stars from the collapse and fragmentation of a molecular cloud Scholz commented A molecular cloud is a massive cold cloud of gas and dust that can stretch for hundreds of light-years according to NASA We re struck by quite how much the infancy of free-floating planetary-mass objects resembles that of stars like the Sun Jayawardhana commented in a message Our new findings underscore that similarity and imply that particular objects comparable to giant planets form the way stars do from contracting clouds of gas and dust accompanied by disks of their own and they go through improvement episodes just like newborn stars When comparing the new facts with archival information the association noted that the planet also experienced a high development rate event observed in hinting at the idea that it may undergo recurring improvement spurts Now the company wants to investigate how long the bursts last and how often they occur From that we can find out how much they really contribute to the rise or what is triggering strong accretion bursts Scholz disclosed The fact that we see accretion bursts across such a wide range of objects must be telling us something we are not quite sure yet what it is Seeing behavior typically associated with the formation of stars in an isolated young planet is critical revealed Dr Jacco van Loon an associate professor of astrophysics and director of the Keele Observatory at Keele University in England He was not involved in the new research but noted that the wealth of observational detail revealed a rich molecular chemistry within the disk around the planet Further research might clarify to what extent this differs from the disks around forming stars but my curiosity focuses on what the composition might be of realizable moons of this massive planet that might also form in this material van Loon declared One can only think of Saturn s moon Titan which boasts an atmosphere and weather to imagine what such moon might be like and whether it could eventually play host to life The investigation also marks an central new step in understanding the accretion process of rogue planets revealed Dr N ria Miret Roig assistant professor in the department of quantum physics and astrophysics at the University of Barcelona in Spain Roig also was not involved in the new survey To deepen our understanding on the origin of these exotic celestial bodies Roig announced it is essential to complement this type of work with studies on their abundance atmospheric composition and the presence and properties of surrounding disks and companions Rogue planets are incredibly dim and faint making them hard to detect But new telescopes such as the Vera C Rubin Observatory the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope or ELT in Chile and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope slated to launch in could change the way astronomers research these wandering worlds and just how starlike they are The ELT will be powerful enough to not only review these faint free-floating planets in much more detail but for example it will also be accomplishable to look for close companions that might be responsible for triggering such bursts Almendros-Abad commented Rubin will catch these rare outbursts across the whole population of known young planetary-mass objects giving us for the first time a statistical picture of how often they happen and how long they last