Using the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA astronomers have clearly imaged in visible light for the first time the largest planet-forming disk ever observed around a young star, with a diameter of nearly 400 billion miles, roughly 40 times the span from our solar system to the edge of the Kuiper Belt. This large and chaotic disk of dust and gas is extremely complex in structure and is expected to rewrite the scientific community's theory of how planetary systems are born in extreme environments.
This protoplanetary disk is numbered IRAS 23077+6707, nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito” by the research team, and is located about 1,000 light-years away from Earth. In the Hubble lens, it almost appears with a "blade facing the Earth". The disk blocks the direct line of sight of the young star in the center, leaving only the upper and lower layers of glowing dust and gas, like a giant hamburger sandwich with distinct layers, hence the name. Scientists currently judge that the center of the disk may be a hot and massive star, or a pair of very close star companion systems.
Unlike the relatively regular structures previously seen in other protoplanetary disks using the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, "Dracula's Chivito" exhibits unprecedentedly violent dynamics. In the newly released images, large-scale, fibrous material flows extend up and down the disk, well above the disk itself, showing that the disk's upper structure is extremely fluffy and turbulent. What’s more striking is that these “erected” long filament-like structures almost only appear on one side of the disk, while the other side has sharp edges and almost no similar filament-like features, showing obvious asymmetry.
Researchers pointed out that such an "eccentric" shape may mean that this protoplanetary disk is being strongly affected by the surrounding environment or the injection of foreign materials. For example, dust and gas from the interstellar medium may have fallen into the disk in large quantities in the near future, or nearby objects may have gravitational interactions with it, disrupting the distribution of matter inside and outside the disk. Joshua Bennett Lovell, an astronomer who participated in the study, said that Hubble provides scientists with an up-close "front-row" opportunity to observe the chaotic physical processes of planetary birth disks in the process of building new planets, and these processes have previously been poorly understood in detail.
According to mass estimates, the total amount of material in the disk of IRAS 23077+6707 is about 10 to 30 times the mass of Jupiter, providing sufficient raw materials for the formation of multiple Jupiter-like planets. This makes it regarded as an "enlarged version" analog of our early solar system, which helps scientists evaluate whether the efficiency and path of planet formation in an extremely large disk environment are similar to those in the solar system. The first author of the paper, Kristina Monsch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, pointed out that in theory, it is entirely possible for such a system to give birth to a huge family of planets. While the specifics of planet formation in such supermassive disks may differ, the dominant processes—the accretion of gas toward the star and the aggregation of remaining dust into planets—are expected to follow similar physical laws.
The high-resolution visible-light observations provided by Hubble were a key breakthrough in this study, allowing scientists to track the tiny structures in the disk at unprecedented fine scales. The research team emphasized that IRAS 23077+6707 provides a new "laboratory" for planet formation research, which can systematically investigate the disk evolution process in extreme mass and highly perturbed environments. At present, scientists still have "more questions than answers" about this system. In the future, they will continue to track its evolution by combining multi-band observations and theoretical models to clarify the birth mechanism of planetary systems under different environments and time scales.
Relevant results have been published in "The Astrophysical Journal" published on December 23, 2025. The paper is titled "Hubble reveals the complex multi-scale structure of the edge-to-protoplanetary disk IRAS 23077+6707."