Hubble caught the largest planet nursery — 40 times wider than our solar system

The disk is 40 times wider than the distance from the Sun to the Kuiper Belt, the edge of our own planetary neighborhood. Its filaments and wisps stretch far above and below the main plane, and they appear on only one side — a lopsidedness that no current model of planet formation predicts.

The system is called IRAS 23077+6707 and now answers to the nickname Dracula’s Chivito, after a Uruguayan sandwich. It sits about a thousand light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Cepheus, and it is edge-on from Earth’s perspective. Hubble sees its full side profile, not the spiral-arm view typical of disks photographed face-on. That orientation is what made the unusual structure visible at all.

For planet formation, scale matters. Standard models picture young stars surrounded by relatively orderly, axisymmetric disks of gas and dust, where dust grains slowly clump into planetesimals over millions of years. A disk 40 times the diameter of our solar system, full of turbulent wisps and one-sided extensions, suggests planet nurseries can be much rougher places than the textbook account allows.

“The level of detail we are seeing is rare in protoplanetary disk imaging, and these new Hubble images show that planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than we expected,” said Kristina Monsch of the Center for Astrophysics — Harvard and Smithsonian, who led the analysis.

How the team obtained the picture matters for trust. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 imaged the system across six broadband filters, from 0.4 to 1.6 micrometers, spanning visible light into the near infrared. Combining the filters revealed scattered starlight reflecting off dust at different layers, which is how the substructure popped out. Because the disk is edge-on, the central star is blocked by its own midplane and does not drown out the surrounding material — turning IRAS 23077+6707 into a rare natural laboratory.

There are reasons to read the result carefully. Visible-light imaging captures the scattering layers of dust, but it does not directly show the molecular gas where most of the planet-building mass actually lives. The asymmetric filaments could reflect a recent encounter with a passing star, a hidden companion still being mapped, or a structural feature of disk evolution that has so far stayed hidden because most disks observed before were not edge-on. A single object, even a record-holding one, is not a population.

Further observations are already in motion. The same team and others are requesting time on the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile to image the molecular-gas component of the disk and search for any substellar companions hidden in the wisps. The Hubble paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal on May 12, 2026, will serve as the visible-light reference image for every follow-up.

Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Kristina Monsch (CfA); processing by Joseph DePasquale (STScI).