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

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A strange, sandwich-shaped object is giving astronomers a rare view of the chaotic birthplaces of planets.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the largest planet-forming disk ever observed around a young star. It spans nearly 400 billion miles — 40 times the diameter of our solar system. Tilted nearly edge-on as seen from Earth, the dark, dusty disk resembles a hamburger. Hubble reveals it to be unusually chaotic, with bright wisps of material extending far above and below the disk—more than seen in any similar circumstellar disk.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the largest planet-forming disk ever observed around a young star. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Kristina Monsch (CfA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))
QUICK FACTS

What it is: IRAS 23077+6707, the largest planet-forming disk ever observed

Where it is: 978 light-years away, in the constellation Cepheus

When it was shared: Dec. 23, 2026

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.

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.

Jamie Carter
Jamie Carter
Live Science contributor

Jamie Carter is a Cardiff, U.K.-based freelance science journalist and a regular contributor to Live Science. He is the author of A Stargazing Program For Beginners and co-author of The Eclipse Effect, and leads international stargazing and eclipse-chasing tours. His work appears regularly in Space.com, Forbes, New Scientist, BBC Sky at Night, Sky & Telescope, and other major science and astronomy publications. He is also the editor of WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com.

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