Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found a huge, messy disc around a young star about 1,000 light-years away. This disc could change the way scientists think about how planetary systems form.
A disc that makes planets that breaks records
The object, which is listed as IRAS 23077+6707, is not a galaxy or a nebula. It has a huge protoplanetary disc around it, which is the kind of structure that planets form from.
The Hubble data shows that the disc is almost 400 billion miles wide. That means it’s about 40 times wider than our solar system, which ends at the Kuiper Belt, where icy objects like Pluto live.
This is the biggest disc of gas and dust that has ever been clearly seen around a young star, and it doesn’t look calm or orderly at all.
You can’t see the main star directly. The disc is so thick and heavy that it blocks out starlight, leaving only a bright halo of scattered light around its top and bottom.
“Dracula’s chivito” is a fun name for a wild system.
The people working on the project have given the system the nickname “Dracula’s chivito.” The phrase refers to the team’s cultural roots, which range from Transylvania to Uruguay, where a chivito is a sandwich with stacked layers of steak.
The disc looks like a cosmic burger when you look at it from the side in the Hubble image. A dark band runs through the middle, where the densest material blocks light. Above and below, glowing layers of gas and dust look like bread and fillings.
Aside from its strange looks, the object is a valuable laboratory. Astronomers can see faint structures high above the main disc that usually go unnoticed in systems that are more face-on because we are looking at it almost sideways.
An uneven and stormy environment
One of the strangest things about the pictures is how clearly the two sides of the disc are not equal. Hubble shows that instead of a neat, symmetrical structure, there are tall filaments and streamers of material sticking out from just one side.Filament-like tendrils rise from the disk on one flank, while the opposite side ends abruptly, with a sharp edge and no visible streamers.
This asymmetry hints at a violent, changing environment. Several possibilities are on the table:
- Fresh infall of gas and dust from nearby space, raining down unevenly on one side
- Gravitational nudges from a hidden companion star or massive planet inside the disk
- Past encounters with nearby stars that warped or disturbed the system
- Powerful outflows or winds blasting material preferentially in one direction
The true culprit may be a combination of these effects. Further observations, potentially with the James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based radio arrays, will be needed to piece together the system’s recent history.
How this disk compares with typical planet nurseries
Around young stars, disks made of dust and gas are standard. Over a few million years, dust grains collide, clump and build up into pebbles, then rocky worlds, and eventually giant planets if enough gas remains.
IRAS 23077+6707 fits this broad picture, but on an outsized scale. Early estimates suggest the disk contains 10 to 30 times the mass of Jupiter in material available for planet building.
| Property | Typical young disk | IRAS 23077+6707 |
|---|---|---|
| Diameter | Comparable to or a bit larger than our solar system | ~40 times the width of the solar system |
| Central star visibility | Often visible, with a bright ring or halo | Completely obscured by thick, edge-on dust |
| Overall symmetry | Roughly even, with balanced features | Strongly asymmetric, with filaments on one side only |
| Estimated disk mass | From a few Earth masses up to several Jupiters | Roughly 10–30 Jupiter masses |
With that much material, the system could feasibly host a sprawling family of planets, including multiple gas giants and swarms of smaller, icy bodies at the fringes.
A polar vortex disruption is on the way, and its magnitude is almost unheard of in February
New questions for planet formation theories
The sheer scale of “Dracula’s chivito” presses on current models of how planetary systems grow. Many theoretical studies are tuned to disks closer in size to our own solar system. Extending those ideas to something 40 times larger may not be straightforward.
IRAS 23077+6707 suggests planet building can thrive in huge, chaotic disks, not just tidy, compact ones like the early solar system.
One open question concerns timescales. If the disk is bigger and more massive, do planets form faster because there is more material, or slower because collisions and migration become messier? Another issue is orbit stability: in such a wide system, distant worlds could be more vulnerable to external tugs from passing stars in the same stellar nursery.
The central star might also be heftier than the Sun, or even a close binary. That would change the gravitational landscape across the disk, shaping where giant planets can form and how their orbits evolve.
What Hubble actually sees
Although the headline image looks like a simple photograph, turning raw data into a clear portrait of IRAS 23077+6707 is a careful process. Hubble detects visible light scattered off dust grains suspended in the upper layers of the disk.
Astronomers then process the images, cleaning up noise, enhancing faint structures and combining exposures to bring out delicate filaments. Subtle colour choices help separate denser, darker regions from more tenuous, glowing material.
Because the central star is hidden, its properties have to be inferred indirectly from the brightness and shape of the surrounding disk, as well as from observations at other wavelengths such as infrared and radio.
Key terms that help make sense of the finding
For readers trying to navigate the jargon, a few terms are worth spelling out clearly.
- Protoplanetary disk: A rotating, flattened structure of gas and dust orbiting a young star, where planets are in the process of forming.
- Light-year: The distance light travels in a year, about 5.9 trillion miles. IRAS 23077+6707 is about 1,000 of these units from Earth.
- Kuiper Belt: A broad ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune. The new disk is about 40 times wider than the distance from the Sun to this region.
- Filaments: Elongated strands of material, in this case dust and gas, stretching above and below the main disk.
Together, these concepts frame what Hubble is showing: not just a pretty picture, but an active construction site, where worlds are likely growing inside an enormous, asymmetric ring of material.
What future observations could reveal Astronomers expect this system to become a long-term target. The James Webb Space Telescope can peer into the infrared, where it will pick up the heat from warm dust and potentially the spectral fingerprints of water vapour, carbon monoxide and organic molecules in the disk.
Radio telescopes such as ALMA in Chile can map the distribution of gas and larger dust grains, measuring how material moves around the star. That motion can betray the tug of unseen planets, even before those worlds become directly visible.
Over the coming decades, repeated observations could catch the disk in the act of changing. Shifts in the brightness or location of filaments would help test ideas about falling material, winds and hidden companions. For planetary science, “Dracula’s chivito” is likely to remain on the menu for quite some time.
