Exoplanet without a sun found gobbling up 6 billion tons of gas and dust per second

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By Victoria Corless, Space.com. 

Excerpt: Scientists have identified a lone planet with a ferocious appetite. Located in the Chamaeleon constellation roughly 620 light-years away, the rogue planet, named Cha 1107-7626, exists in the vast emptiness of space, far from the warmth of any star. ...Using the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have caught it pulling in gas and dust at an astonishing rate: six billion tons every single second. Never before has a rogue planet, or any planet, been observed growing this fast. "This is the strongest accretion episode ever recorded for a planetary-mass object," Almendros-Abad said. With a mass equivalent to between five and 10 Jupiters, Cha 1107-7626 is one of the lowest-mass free-floating planets known to host a disk and show active accretion. Observations from ESO's VLT and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal telltale signs of a rich, evolving system ...silicate features...similar to those in stars and brown dwarfs...hydrocarbon emission lines pointing to a carbon-rich disk, and multiple signatures of ongoing accretion.... 

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