A team of astronomers has captured the most detailed images yet of what NASA and multiple research teams describe as the largest planet-forming disk ever found: a turbulent, lopsided swirl of gas and dust stretching roughly 400 billion miles across, wrapped around a star so young it may not have ignited nuclear fusion. The disk, cataloged as IRAS 23077+6707 and nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito,” orbits its host about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cepheus. At roughly 4,200 astronomical units in diameter, it dwarfs our entire solar system by a factor of 40.
“This is unlike any protoplanetary disk we’ve ever seen,” said Kristina Monsch, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian who helped lead the research. The peer-reviewed results, published in The Astrophysical Journal, describe a structure so chaotic and oversized that it challenges conventional models of how planets assemble.
The quirky nickname has a backstory. Monsch and her colleagues named it after the chivito, a stacked Uruguayan sandwich, because the disk’s edge-on orientation makes it look like layers of ingredients pressed between two slices of bread. The “Dracula” part nods to its home in Cepheus, a constellation associated with a mythological king sometimes linked to vampire lore.
Three telescopes, one enormous disk
The object first turned up in data from the Pan-STARRS survey telescope in Hawaii, which resolved a broad, elongated silhouette in optical scattered light. A 2024 discovery paper detailed the initial findings. Follow-up observations with the Submillimeter Array, also in Hawaii, confirmed the presence of cold dust and molecular gas by detecting 1.3 mm continuum emission and carbon monoxide spectral lines at 225 GHz. Together, those instruments established that IRAS 23077+6707 is a gas-rich, edge-on disk consistent with a very young planetary nursery.
NASA then pointed the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 at the target, imaging it across wavelengths from 0.4 to 1.6 micrometers. Hubble resolved a dark midplane lane, the shadow cast by the densest part of the disk, and revealed filaments extending roughly 10 arcseconds on the northern side. The lane narrows at different wavelengths, a behavior that points to complex dust and gas layering rather than a smooth, orderly structure.
A NASA overview called the disk “unexpectedly chaotic,” language grounded in data from all three facilities rather than a single snapshot.
Enough raw material for a giant solar system
The disk holds an estimated 10 to 30 Jupiter masses of material, according to the Center for Astrophysics. For comparison, the protoplanetary disk that gave rise to our own solar system is thought to have contained only a few percent of the Sun’s mass. Dracula’s Chivito sits at the upper extreme of what theorists consider plausible for a single-star system.
With that much raw material, the disk could in principle produce a wide variety of planetary architectures: tightly packed rocky worlds, gas giants far larger than Jupiter, or distant icy super-Earths on elongated orbits. But whether it will produce any planets at all, or instead fragment into multiple stellar companions, remains an open question.
A lopsided puzzle
The most striking feature in the Hubble images is the disk’s stark asymmetry. One side looks dramatically different from the other, with northern filaments extending well beyond the southern edge. Co-investigator Joshua Bennett Lovell described this as a “puzzling asymmetry,” signaling that the research team does not yet have a confident explanation.
Several possibilities are on the table. An unseen companion star or a massive planet on a wide orbit could be pulling material outward on one side. The disk may be interacting with leftover envelope material from the star’s formation. Or gravitational instabilities within the disk itself could be concentrating mass into spiral arms and clumps, warping its shape from the inside out.
Millimeter-wavelength follow-up from the Submillimeter Array and the NOEMA interferometer in the French Alps has detected asymmetric substructure in the dust continuum that is physically independent of what Hubble sees in scattered light. That matters because optical and millimeter observations trace different grain populations: small grains at the disk surface versus larger, settled grains closer to the midplane. The fact that both wavelength regimes show lopsidedness strengthens the case that something fundamental is shaping the disk, not just a trick of how light bounces off its surface.
What scientists still do not know
The host star’s evolutionary stage remains uncertain. IRAS 23077+6707 is described as “unborn” or very young, still embedded in its natal material. Whether the central object has begun hydrogen fusion or remains a collapsing protostellar core is not firmly established. That distinction matters: a true protostar might still be gaining mass from the surrounding envelope, feeding the disk and sustaining its chaotic appearance, while a more mature young star would be expected to start clearing out the surrounding gas.
Even the mass estimate carries significant caveats. Converting millimeter-wave brightness into a mass figure requires assumptions about dust opacity, the gas-to-dust ratio, and temperature, all of which are difficult to pin down in such an unusual environment. If the dust grains are larger or more porous than assumed, the same observed brightness could correspond to substantially more or less material.
The distance estimate of roughly 300 parsecs (about 1,000 light-years) also underpins every calculation of the disk’s physical size and mass. Any future revision to that distance, from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, for instance, would ripple through the numbers.
Full radiative-transfer modeling outputs and detailed envelope parameters from the primary research groups have not yet been released in publicly accessible data tables. That limits the ability of independent teams to test competing hypotheses or reproduce the mass and temperature estimates in detail.
How Dracula’s Chivito compares
Most well-studied protoplanetary disks are far smaller and tidier. The disk around HL Tauri, famously imaged by the ALMA telescope in 2014, spans roughly 200 AU and displays neat concentric rings that likely trace forming planets. PDS 70, another landmark system, is only about 140 AU across and hosts two confirmed protoplanets caught in the act of gathering gas. Dracula’s Chivito, at 4,200 AU, is an order of magnitude larger than either and far more disordered.
That scale forces theorists to confront scenarios that smaller, circular disks tend to sidestep: late infall of material from the surrounding molecular cloud, gravitational fragmentation that might seed multiple giant planets simultaneously, and prolonged tug-of-war interactions between a still-growing star and its oversized disk.
Planned observations and open questions for Dracula’s Chivito
Future kinematic mapping, tracking gas velocities across the disk at fine resolution, could reveal whether localized velocity shifts betray a hidden gravitational perturber such as a wide-orbit companion. High-resolution millimeter spectroscopy might uncover spiral patterns in the gas motion, signatures that would help distinguish between self-gravity, external infall, and companion-driven disturbances. Polarimetric imaging, meanwhile, could refine estimates of dust grain sizes and orientations, clarifying how much of the observed asymmetry reflects genuine mass concentrations versus variations in how light scatters off the disk surface.
As of late May 2026, no additional observing campaigns targeting IRAS 23077+6707 have been publicly announced, but the system’s sheer size and complexity make it a natural priority for the James Webb Space Telescope and next-generation ground-based interferometers. Whatever Dracula’s Chivito becomes, whether a sprawling planetary system, a binary star, or something stranger, its current state already marks the outer boundary of where and how planets can begin to form.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
