Giant cosmic 'sandwich' is the largest planet-forming disk ever seen — Space photo of the week

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a spectacular new image of the largest and most unusual protoplanetary disk ever observed around a single star. The object, officially known as IRAS 23077+6707 and nicknamed "Dracula's Chivito," is a dusty disk that resembles a sandwich.

Rich in gas and dust, a protoplanetary disk is where planets — both rocky worlds, like Earth, and gas giants, like Jupiter — can form around young stars. Dracula's Chivito could, in theory, contain a vast planetary system. Its name references both its appearance and its discoverers, who come from Transylvania, Romania (home of the fictional Dracula), and Uruguay, where the national dish is the chivito, a sandwich of sliced beef, ham, mozzarella, tomatoes and olives — which resembles the layers of gas and dust in the protoplanetary disk.

In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, astronomers estimate that the cosmic sandwich spans nearly 400 billion miles (640 billion kilometers) — more than 100 times the diameter of our inner solar system, where all the known planets orbit. Tilted nearly edge-on as seen from Earth, the object was first identified in 2016 and has now been confirmed as a massive planet-forming disk.

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Thought to contain a hot, massive star or a pair of stars at its center, the enormous disk is surprisingly chaotic, with bright wisps of material seen far above and below the disk.

"The level of detail we're seeing is rare in protoplanetary disk imaging," Kristina Monsch, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. "These new Hubble images show that planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than we expected."

The system contains bright, vertically stretched filaments of gas on only one side, while the opposite side has a sharp edge.

"We were stunned to see how asymmetric this disk is," co-investigator Joshua Bennett Lovell, also an astronomer at the CfA, said in the 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."

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.