University Provost and Professor Ray Jayawardhana is the senior co-author of a new publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters outlining observations of a young rogue planet about 620 light-years away from Earth that has experienced a record-breaking growth spurt. “We’ve caught this newborn rogue planet in the act of gobbling up stuff at a furious pace,” said Jayawardhana. “Our new findings imply that some objects comparable to giant planets form the way stars do, from contracting clouds of gas and dust accompanied by disks of their own, and they go through growth episodes just like newborn stars.”