Astronomers have documented an extraordinary cosmic phenomenon concerning the rogue planet Cha 1107-7626, located approximately 620 light-years away in the constellation of Chamaeleon. This celestial body, free from a stellar orbit, is undergoing a period of unprecedented mass accretion, absorbing gas and dust from its surrounding disk at a rate of 6.6 billion tons per second as of October 2025. This exponential increase, which began in June 2025, marks the most intense growth episode ever recorded for a planetary-mass object. Cha 1107-7626 possesses a mass between five and ten times that of Jupiter and floats freely through interstellar space.
Observations conducted with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile's Atacama Desert, complemented by data from the James Webb Space Telescope, revealed that the planet is accumulating material at a rate eight times higher than observed in previous months. This phenomenon suggests that rogue planets may form in a manner analogous to stars, through the collapse and fragmentation of a molecular cloud, rather than being ejected from pre-existing stellar systems. The discovery challenges traditional planetary formation theories and offers new perspectives on the evolution of planetary-mass objects in interstellar space. It is noted that the planet's magnetic field plays a significant role in attracting surrounding material, similar to the process in young stars.
Ongoing research continues to analyze the mechanisms driving this accelerated growth in rogue planets, aiming to better understand the formation and evolution processes of star-free worlds. Recent studies indicate that the composition of the surrounding disk, rich in heavy elements, could play a crucial role in sustaining such high accretion rates, offering new insights into the diversity of planetary evolutionary pathways. Furthermore, the chemical composition of the disk around the planet has changed during this growth episode: the presence of water vapor was discovered, which had not been observed before for planets. Cha 1107-7626's capacity to attract and integrate material at this velocity raises fundamental questions about the dynamics of protoplanetary disks and the possibility that such objects could develop atmospheres or even conditions favorable to life in the absence of a parent star. Spectroscopic analysis of the accreted materials may provide clues about the chemistry of these disks and the environmental conditions surrounding rogue planets during their most active formative stages.