NASA's Hubble sees a stunning planet-forming disk. It's a real doozy.

Astronomers have found a planet-forming disk that looks like a solar system on steroids. 

New images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have revealed an enormous, oddly shaped disk of gas and dust around a single massive star or pair of stars about 1,000 light-years away in space. This thing spans nearly 400 billion miles — 40 times the width of everything around the sun, including the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt of comets.

The telescope has captured the system from its side profile, allowing researchers to study its structure in unusual detail. This makes the object, known as IRAS 23077+6707, a sort of laboratory for the planet-making industry, said Kristina Monsch, lead author of the new paper, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal. 

And what researchers found was that making new worlds can be a messy business. 

"Planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than we expected," said Monsch, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a statement. 

What is a protoplanetary disk?

So-called "protoplanetary disks" form naturally when stars are born. They supply the raw material that later becomes exoplanets, moons, and smaller bodies, like asteroids and comets. To understand how planetary systems develop, scientists need to know how these disks are structured inside and how that structure changes over time.

When disks are seen almost exactly from the side, like this one, it's especially valuable. From this angle, the disk itself blocks the star’s direct light, like placing your hand in front of a bright lamp. This makes the disk appear as a dark band across the middle, with bright regions above and below where light scatters off dust. 

That's why the researchers say IRAS 23077+6707 resembles a burger (though we prefer the image of a macaron cookie, in an elegant pastel hue). The researchers — one of whom calls Transylvania home and another from Uruguay, where the national dish is a sandwich called a chivito — have dubbed it "Dracula's Chivito" to reflect their heritage.  

Hubble's vantage point allowed scientists to observe how material is distributed around the central star or stars. The amount of dust and size of the grains, as well as how the dust interacts with gas and is vertically stacked, all influence what kinds of planets can eventually form.

What astronomers saw in Dracula's Chivito was surprising. Smoky wisps rise high above the disk instead of settling into a flat layer. Long, thread-like filaments stretch outward on one side of the disk but not the other. Its lopsided brightness and shape also change depending on the light wavelength observed, showing that different kinds of dust are arranged at different heights.

The largest forming solar system disk

In theory, Dracula's Chivito could host a vast planetary system, Monsch said. The disk's mass is estimated at 10 to 30 times that of Jupiter — ample material for forming multiple gas giants.

This diagram depicts Dracula's Chivita, a distant planet-forming disk of dust and its surrounding structures, at different wavelengths of light. Credit: Kristina Monsch et al. / DOI 10.3847/1538-4357/ae247f

But the images do not reveal whether planets are already forming, or how many might eventually appear. Instead, they show something more fundamental: The environment where planets grow may stay off-balance and active far longer than anyone thought. Because the researchers didn't see any jets of material shooting away from the system, the disk is believed to be relatively mature, no longer pulling in bulk material from its surroundings.

Despite its age, Dracula's Chivito still essentially looks like a work in progress. Future observations with other telescopes might help astronomers find out whether this sprawling, imbalanced disk will eventually settle down, said Joshua Bennett Lovell, a co-investigator from the Center for Astrophysics. 

"We were stunned to see how asymmetric this disk is," Lovell said in a statement. "Hubble has given us a front row seat to the chaotic processes that are shaping disks as they build new planets — processes that we don't yet fully understand but can now study in a whole new way."