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Six billion tonnes a second: Rogue planet found growing at record rate (www.eso.org)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/astronomy@lemmy.world
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"(ESO’s VLT) reveals that this free-floating planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at a rate of six billion tonnes a second. This is the strongest growth rate ever recorded for a rogue planet, or a planet of any kind...."

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[–] 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

So it is at ten times Jupiters mass, and eats like a growing boy.

Interesting to see. Will it be able to feed up enough to ignite? For that it would need about a thousand Jupiter masses (so much about Jupiter just missing to turn into a sun...).

More mass, more gravity, more attractive to free-floating matter. But still some way to go from 10 to 1000 Jupiters.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    According to Wikipedia, it only needs to be 80 times as massive:

    Jupiter would need to be about 80 times as massive to fuse hydrogen and become a star.[8]

    Six billion tons a second ends up as an increase of about seven orders of magnitude lower than jupiters mass in a year, so it’s still several millions of years away from that point, assuming linear growth. I see no reason to assume linear growth, but this is probably still not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    OK, different source, different numbers. I thought I had a good source.

    I disagree on the millions of years in the future, though: the more mass it gets, the faster it acquires more, so this is more exponential than linear. It won't be anytime soon, yes, but maybe faster than you think.

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