USA Update

THE CHICAGO BEARS may require taxpayer dollars for their new stadium.

The Bears initially wanted half of their new ground and mixed-use development funded with public money.

Stephen R. Sylvanie-Imagn Images

That request was rejected but Chicago taxpayers may still have to contribute a substantial amount.

According to Front Office Sports, the NFL franchise wants $855million in public money.

The Bears officially have a new site for their planned stadium and are willing to pay for much of the project themselves.

The total sum is expected to cost a grand total of about $5billion. 

The NFL giants have released a new economic impact statement for the proposed domed stadium and mixed-use development.

The Bears plan to build on land they own in suburban Arlington Heights, Ill. 

The contribution from taxpayer dollars is targeted primarily for improvements to nearby roads and rail lines.

Time is of the essence for the franchise as construction costs continue to escalate by more than $10million per month.

The Bears issued the following statement: “We are urging state leaders to pass the Mega Project legislation, which creates a fair, predictable framework for property taxes that applies to any large-scale investment in Illinois.

“With this certainty, we can move forward ensuring this once-in-a-generation project becomes a reality.”

The Bears are back in action on October 14 when they visit the Washington Commanders at Northwest Stadium.

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Somewhere between the second cup of cha and the fifth WhatsApp ping in the family group, it begins. Not officially, but you can feel it.

A ROGUE planet was spotted growing at a mind-bending rate of six billion tonnes a SECOND.

The lost world doesn’t have a home star, which means it’s drifting through space – and furiously feeding as it goes.

ESO

This illustration shows what the rogue planet looks like as it feeds on nearby matter[/caption]

It’s called Cha 1107-7626 and it’s about five to 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

And it’s roughly 620 lightyears away in the constellation of Chamaeleon.

Astronomers say the rate at which it was spotted growing is record-breaking, calling it a “growth spurt”.

The free-floating “rogue planet” was detected feeding on gas and dust from its surroundings at “six billion tonnes a second”.

“This is the strongest growth rate ever recorded for a rogue planet, or a planet of any kind,” the astronomers noted.

The planet is surrounded by a massive disc made up of gas and dust.

And this material is constantly falling onto the alien world, which is a process called accretion.

The rate of growth has changed over time.

And scientists say that by August 2025, is was accreting roughly eight times faster than a few months earlier – reaching the mind-bending six-billion-tonnes-per-second.

“This is the strongest accretion episode ever recorded for a planetary-mass object,” lead author Víctor Almendros-Abad.

“People may think of planets as quiet and stable worlds,” astronomer Almendros-Abad, of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, continued.

“But with this discovery we see that planetary-mass objects freely floating in space can be exciting places.”

The discovery was made using the European Southern Observatory’s VLT, or Very Large Telescope, which is located in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

The team also used some data from the James Webb Space Telescope to make their findings.

ESO

You can’t see it clearly here, but the rogue planet is found in the dead-centre of this image[/caption]

And it might change the way that we think about rogue planets.

“The origin of rogue planets remains an open question,” said co-author and astronomer Aleks Scholz, of the University of St Andrews.

“Are they the lowest-mass objects formed like stars, or giant planets ejected from their birth systems?”

And fellow St Andrews astronomer Belinda Damian said: “This discovery blurs the line between stars and planets.

“And gives us a sneak peek into the earliest formation periods of rogue planets.”

To make the discovery, astronomers compared the light emitted before and during the burst.

And they were able to gather clues about how the accretion process worked.

They think that magnetic activity played a role in “driving the dramatic infall of mass” – a process normally only observed in stars, the scientists said.

ESO

The planet had a huge ‘growth spurt’ that saw it balloon by 6 billion tonnes every second[/caption]

They added: “The team also found that the chemistry of the disc around the planet changed during the accretion episode, with water vapour being detected during it but not before.

“This phenomenon had been spotted in stars but never in a planet of any kind.”

Rogue planets – officially termed free-floating planets – are usually very difficult to detect.

Often spotting a planet involves looking for a “transit”, which is when it passes in front of the face of its host star, dimming its light briefly.

But rogue planets don’t have a host star.

Astronomers are hopeful that the ESO’s upcoming Extremely Large Telescope will be able to make it easier to spot these so-called “lonely planets”.

Riley Gaines announced the birth of her first child, a daughter named Margot, Thursday night.