Astronomers this week were stunned after discovering a “rogue planet” with a record-shattering growth rate of six billion tonnes per second.
Located around 620 light-years away from Earth, scientists say it has experienced a record-breaking “growth spurt” – “gobbling up” gas and dust at a “furious” pace.
Unlike the planets in our Solar System, so-called “rogue planets” don’t orbit stars, free-floating on their own.
The new observations, made with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), located in Chile’s Atacama Desert, reveal that the planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at a rate of six billion tonnes a second.
It is the strongest growth rate ever recorded by a planet of any kind, according to the study by an international team of astronomers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
But researchers have now found that the rate at which the planet is accreting is not steady.
By August this year, the planet was accreting at a rate of six billion tonnes per second, around eight times faster than just a few months before.
Study senior co-author Professor Ray Jayawardhana, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, said: “We’ve caught this newborn rogue planet in the act of gobbling up stuff at a furious pace.
“Monitoring its behavior over the past few months, with two of the most 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.”
He added: “Their infancy appears to be much more tumultuous than we had realised.”