Rogue planet gains 6 billion tonnes per second in record growth spurt

A voracious thug planet was surprised eating 6 billion tonnes of gas and dust per second. This behavior blurs the line between the planets and the stars, which suggests that the two can form in a similar way.

The hideout planets, the floating gas balls of gas not attached to any parent star, seem extremely common and can even exceed the number of stars that we see in the galaxy. But astronomers still do not understand if they are formed as planets in orbit around a star and are then banished to wander alone in the galaxy, or if they can form like stars by themselves.

Víctor almendros-Abad in Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Italy and his colleagues have now seen a Voyou planet called Cha 1107-7626 by a phenomenal growth push.

The planet drew the attention of astronomers for the first time in 2008 because it had what seemed to be a primitive planetary disk that forms around it. Almendros -Abad and his team began to observe the planet with the very large telescope of the Southern European Observatory in Chile in April this year, but in June, he suddenly started consuming the material at almost 10 times the rate he had previously – and he maintained this for the next two months.

It has reached a growth rate that has previously been observed only in the stars, like our sun, which has more than 100 times more mass.

“This tells us that the process that forms stars is most likely the same that forms these objects,” explains Almendros-Abad. “It also means that when we think of the training of stars, we must also think about it [rogue planets]. “”

To take into account this growth rate, Almendros-Abad and his team think that a mechanism similar to that found in the stars must be at stake, where powerful magnetic fields were singing material through a narrow channel from the volume of gas and dust beyond. But we don’t know exactly how, or why, the planet suddenly started to consume much more mass.

Such similar growth processes suggest that stars and planets are even more similar than we thought, explains Almendros-Abad. “Whenever we look at these [rogue planets]He tells us that we don’t really know where the difference between stars and planets is. There must be a chemical imprint, but we have not yet found the rosetta stone how to differentiate the training scenarios. »»

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