This large space sandwich broke a record

explores

TIts image may look like a radioactive hamburger floating in space, but you’re actually staring at the largest planet-forming disk ever seen around a young star. The disorganized disk is about 400 billion miles in diameter, or about 40 times the diameter of our entire solar system.

The size of the disk and the fact that it is oriented so that its edge faces Earth — which obscures the glow of the central star — allowed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to capture it in great detail with visible light: wisps of dust and gas extend above and below the disk further than have ever been observed in similar systems.

The alien planetary nursery, nicknamed Dracula’s Chivito, was only identified as a protoplanetary disk in 2024, and is located about 1,000 light-years from Earth. The name is a reference to two researchers who Help discover itwho come from Transylvania and Uruguay – there, com. chivito sandwich It is the national dish.

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New insights have recently emerged from this unique look at Dracula’s Chivito published in Astrophysical Journal.

“The level of detail we see is rare in imaging a protoplanetary disk, and the new Hubble images show that planetary nurseries can be more active and chaotic than we expected,” said Christina Munch, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. statement.

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Another strange detail in the image of Civito’s Dracula: Munch and her colleagues only noticed longer, antennae-like filaments of gas and dust on the north side of the disk. “We were amazed to see how asymmetric this disk was,” said paper co-author Joshua Bennett Lovell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. This strange property indicates that “dynamic processes, such as the recent fall of dust and gas, or interactions with the surrounding environment, are what form the disk,” according to the statement.

Protoplanetary disks are cosmic nurseries of planets. They form from the remains of dust and gas surrounding young stars. The researchers point out that the Chivito Dracula resembles a larger version of our nascent solar system, containing enough ingredients to produce several gas giants such as Jupiter. Ultimately, this space sandwich could help reveal new secrets about the formation of planetary systems like ours.

“Hubble has given us a front-row seat to the chaotic processes that form disks as they build new planets, processes we don’t yet fully understand but can now study in a whole new way,” Lovell said.