A young rogue planet 622 light-years away from Earth is going through a remarkable growth spurt. Sounds great, isn't it?
A planet called Cha 1107-7626 has been observed by astronomers absorbing gas and dust from the surrounding disc at a record-breaking rate of six billion tones per second for a planet of its size. Earlier, stars, but not planets, have exhibited similar behavior.
Víctor Almendros-Abad, an astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo and lead author of the study, said, "We were trying to study how fast is the rate of material getting into the object. And what we suddenly found is that there was a very strong growth of material that was impacting the central object."
"And when we saw this, it's when we realized that it was a very special phenomenon. This is the first time that this kind of phenomena has been observed in such a low mass object," Almendros-Abad added.
Cha 1107-7626, which is five to ten times the size of Jupiter, is still forming. Its feeding frenzy is all the more fascinating because, as a rogue planet, it travels freely through space without circling a star. Unusually fast growth is being fueled by the gas and dust torrent.
"So in this growth spurt, what we found is that there was an increase by almost an order of magnitude, almost 10 times more mass and flux coming into the object. So, this is very significant because you have typical variations because of some inhomogeneities in the material around it, but this kind of variation is not typically observed. It's not routine variability," explained Almendros-Abad.
One theory is that material is being funneled into the planet by magnetic fields, a process that has long been understood in star formation but has never been seen in a planet.
Amelia Bayo, an astronomer at the European Space Observatory and a co-author of the report, said, "In astronomy, when we talk about quick things, for instance, we say that star formation happens quickly - and quickly we mean a million years. So quickly is very relative."
"But this object went from gaining material at a very different rate, so at a low level, let's say, to gaining material hundreds of times more efficiently in days. Something that happens in a matter of days and months in astrophysics is crazy," added Bayo.
The European Space Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile's X-shooter spectrograph and data from the James Webb Telescope were used to make the discovery.
Astronomers were able to piece together how the planet was accreting matter by analyzing light before and during the burst, but many questions remain.
Almendros-Abad said, "So we will definitely follow up on this object because we have observations from this object from almost 20 years ago and 15 years ago and we see a similar behavior. So, there are indications that this is a recurrent event."
"Now we need to understand how recurrent, how important, how long-lasting because we didn't get an idea of the full duration of this burst. We just had a lower limit, let's say, because after two months, we couldn't continue observing. So, it could be possible that the object is still in this during this enhanced accretion phase," he concluded.
