Unrivaled values Planet baby amazes scientists
Baby planet with a growth spurt: "Cha 1107-7626" has increased enormously in mass within weeks. The concrete value is astonishing.
05.10.2025, 22:15
05.10.2025, 22:35
dpa
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- The loner planet "Cha 1107-7626" is currently gaining six billion tons of mass per second.
- The growth rate is the highest ever measured for a planet.
- Researchers see parallels with the formation of stars.
Six billion tons per second - this is the rate at which the planet "Cha 1107-7626" absorbed gas and dust from its surroundings in August 2025. According to the European Southern Observatory (ESO), this is the highest growth rate ever measured for a planet.
"Cha 1107-7626" is a so-called loner planet: unlike the planets in our solar system, it does not orbit a star, but drifts freely in space. Observations with the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have now revealed its enormous appetite. The engulfed material is roughly twice the mass of Lake Starnberg.
According to the team led by Víctor Almendros-Abad from the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo (Italy), the discovery points to parallels with the formation of stars.
Planet is located in the constellation Chameleon
"Cha 1107-7626" has five to ten times the mass of Jupiter and is located around 620 light years away in the constellation of Chameleon, according to the report. It is still in the formation phase and is fed by a disk of gas and dust that surrounds the planet, the team reports in the "Astrophysical Journal Letters".
In August, the planet was devouring matter around eight times faster than just a few months earlier.
