Hubble spies a chaotic planet nursery 40 times wider than our solar system

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a turbulent protoplanetary disk that is roughly 40 times wider than our entire solar system out to the Kuiper Belt — nearly 400 billion miles across — and substantially stranger than astronomers expected, a new study reports.

The system, catalogued as IRAS 23077+6707 and nicknamed "Dracula's Chivito," sits about 1,000 light-years from Earth. Hubble's visible-light view reveals towering wispy filaments rising from only one side of the disk, an asymmetry that current planet-formation models do not predict.

Astronomers estimate the disk holds 10 to 30 Jupiter masses of dust and gas — easily enough raw material to assemble multiple giant planets. The lopsided filaments could mark either an ongoing collision with another stellar object or an unusually clumpy phase of disk evolution.

The research, led by Kristina Monsch of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, was published in The Astrophysical Journal. The team plans follow-up observations with JWST in the infrared to map the disk's internal structure and look for signs of forming planets inside the chaos.