Hubble Reveals 'Dracula's Chivito,' the Largest Chaotic Planet Nursery Ever Observed

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a visible-light image of the largest and most chaotic planet-forming disk ever observed, a sprawling structure nicknamed "Dracula's Chivito" that wraps around a young star roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth and stretches nearly 400 billion miles from edge to edge — about 40 times the diameter of our solar system out to the Kuiper Belt. The new observations of the system, formally catalogued as IRAS 23077+6707, were released Monday by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and described in detail in a paper accepted by The Astrophysical Journal.

Lead author Ciprian T. Berghea, an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory, and co-author Victor Hugo Pacheco-Chávez of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid said they coined the nickname as a nod to their heritages — Berghea is Romanian-born, like Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, and Pacheco-Chávez is Uruguayan, where the national sandwich is the chivito. The disk had been picked up in earlier infrared and millimeter-wavelength surveys, but Hubble's optical imaging is the first to show that the disk is dramatically asymmetric, with tall, wispy filaments of dust and gas stretching above and below the midplane on one side and nothing comparable on the other.

The team estimates the disk contains between 10 and 30 times the mass of Jupiter in raw material, more than enough to manufacture multiple gas-giant planets and possibly an entire scaled-up solar system. Edge-on to Earth's line of sight, the disk resembles a luminous hamburger bun split by a dark central lane of opaque dust. Hidden inside that dust lane is either a single very massive young star, perhaps eight to ten solar masses, or a closely-orbiting pair of stars whose mutual gravitational tug-of-war could explain the disk's turbulent and lopsided appearance, the researchers said.

If IRAS 23077+6707 turns out to be a binary system, it would help astronomers refine theories of how planets form around stars more massive and more energetic than the Sun, where stellar radiation typically blows away the protoplanetary material before giant planets have time to coalesce. The discovery of so much material around such a young massive object means the conventional dispersal timescale may be too short by a factor of two or three. "What we are seeing is a snapshot of a planetary system being built on a scale we did not think nature could do," Berghea said in a NASA statement accompanying the release.

The team plans follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope's MIRI instrument and with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to map the disk's chemistry and look for clumps of gas dense enough to be the seeds of forming planets. Webb's longer-wavelength sensitivity should peer through the central dust lane and finally settle whether one star or two lie at the heart of Dracula's Chivito. Initial ALMA time has been allocated for observations beginning in August. Hubble is now in its 36th year of operations and remains the only space telescope capable of imaging large protoplanetary structures in visible light at this level of detail.