“(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…”
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.
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.
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.
But also the bigger it gets, the faster it clears its orbit, so the slower it grows.
Interesting aspect, yes. Now we need someone with the right simulation tools who can run this for a better answer.
Yeah, I agree it’s definitely not going to be linear growth, but I don’t think any potential great grandchildren of ours will live to see it.
Agreed, they won’t. By far. Maybe even humans won’t see it lighting up.
Fascinating! At one point, I can’t help but think, why do we spend money on something so far away, but on the other hand I’m always fascinated by space news
The money is spent here, on Earth. It goes on wages, utilities, contractors and the like. Spending money is great, it keeps it circulating around! And in this case, in addition to paying everyone and everything involved, we add to our understanding of the universe. Money well spent.
I understand the economics of it, and appreciate the science, but can’t help thinking that money could be spent on other things, that could be more beneficial to mankind, like climate research or finding ways to transition away from oil and plastics
why do we spend money on something so far away
I suppose for the same reason we spend so much money to gather intelligence on foreign countries. And besides ‘black holes’ there are a lot of ‘rogue planets’ out there. They’re are being spotted as we’ve recently gotten a new wave of much better telescopes.
