“This is the strongest accretion episode ever recorded for a planetary-mass object,” Víctor Almendros-Abad, an astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Palermo, in Italy, said in a ESO press release.
This closer view of Cha 1107-7626 shows the intense bright region in the rogue planet’s cloud layers caused by its magnetic field drawing in material from the disk around it. The increase in the rogue planet’s brightness, caused by these spots, was what alerted astronomers to its rapid rate of consumption. (ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser)
“People may think of planets as quiet and stable worlds, but with this discovery we see that planetary-mass objects freely floating in space can be exciting places,” Almendros-Abad explained.
Combining observations with the X-shooter spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and past data gathered with the SINFONI spectrograph on VLT, Almendros-Abad and his colleagues used the brightness of Cha 1107-7626 to determine how quickly it was accreting matter.
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Planetary size, Stellar behaviour
In a rather bizarre twist, by observing this dramatic increase in accretion, it turns out that they actually caught Cha 1107-7626 displaying some very star-like behaviour.
This included the planet’s magnetic field playing a role in how quickly it accreted matter, something that was thought only to occur with stellar-mass objects. Plus, they also detected chemical changes in the disk around Cha 1107-7626, resulting in the production of both hydrocarbons and water.
“When we examined the data, we didn’t expect such a dramatic result,” Almendros Abad said in an Astronomical Observatory of Palermo press release. “The James Webb data showed us that the chemistry of the protoplanetary disk changed due to the accretion of material, a phenomenon that had previously only been observed in a few stars.”