About 620 light years away in the constellation Chamaeleon, a strange planet is devouring everything around it at a furious pace.

Cha 1107-7626, a “rogue” planet because it doesn’t orbit a star, has suddenly increased its appetite in recent months and is now gobbling every bit of gas, dust and rocks near it at an astonishing rate of six billion tons per second, according to a new study by European scientists published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The planet is about five to 10 times Jupiter’s mass and has been growing for aeons, according to observations taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert of Chile.

But in August, scientists noticed that its growth had spiked to about eight times what it had been earlier in the year, mak

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