When Kristina Monsch first pulled up the new Hubble Space Telescope images of the young star IRAS 23077+6707, she was not looking at the orderly, ring-shaped nursery that planet-formation textbooks describe. She was looking at chaos: warped dust lanes, lopsided brightness, wispy filaments streaming off in directions no simulation had anticipated. The object, nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito” for its resemblance to a bat-winged sandwich in earlier survey photos, holds the record as the largest known planet-forming disk. And as of May 2026, thanks to Hubble’s sharpest view yet, it also holds the record for defying expectations.
“We knew this disk was big, but we didn’t expect it to be this disturbed,” Monsch, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian who led the Hubble observing program, said in a NASA statement. The results challenge a core assumption baked into most planet-formation models: that the gas and dust swirling around a young star settle into a relatively calm, symmetric structure within a few hundred thousand years.
A disk that dwarfs the solar system
IRAS 23077+6707 first caught astronomers’ attention in 2024, when images from the Pan-STARRS sky survey revealed an unusually large, edge-on structure surrounding a young star roughly 980 light-years from Earth. A preprint analyzing the discovery used scattered-light imaging and radiative transfer modeling to estimate the disk’s size and mass. The numbers were striking: the disk stretches roughly 4,800 astronomical units across, meaning it would engulf our entire solar system many times over. For comparison, Neptune orbits the Sun at about 30 astronomical units, and even the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt sits at roughly 50.
But Pan-STARRS could only show a blurry smear. To see what was actually happening inside the disk, Monsch’s team secured time on Hubble through observing program GO 17751. Using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) across multiple filters, they achieved resolution finer than 0.1 arcseconds, sharp enough to pick out structural details invisible to ground-based telescopes and earlier space-based snapshots.
What Hubble actually revealed
At that resolution, the disk’s central dark lane, the dense band of dust that blocks starlight and creates the silhouette visible from Earth, turned out to be warped and uneven rather than straight. Above and below the lane, reflected starlight was patchy, broken into clumps and streamers rather than the smooth gradient a symmetric disk would produce. The northern and southern halves of the disk looked markedly different from each other in brightness and texture, according to a detailed analysis of the high-resolution imaging.
These are not subtle statistical wobbles. The asymmetries stand out clearly in the images, and they extend into the disk’s upper layers, not just its dense midplane. That matters because the upper layers are where starlight scatters off small dust grains, meaning whatever is disturbing this disk is reshaping it from top to bottom.
Separate observations at submillimeter wavelengths, using the Submillimeter Array (SMA) and the NOEMA interferometer, independently confirmed the disk’s physical reality and its internal disorder. Those instruments trace larger dust grains and cooler material closer to the midplane, a fundamentally different view than Hubble’s optical scattered light. Yet both windows told the same story: multiple radial brightness peaks and troughs hinting at rings or cavities, plus a pronounced north-south brightness contrast. When two independent methods using different wavelengths agree on the same large-scale irregularities, the case for genuine structural complexity becomes difficult to dismiss.
Why models didn’t see this coming
The 2024 radiative transfer models that accompanied the disk’s discovery assumed a relatively orderly geometry because the Pan-STARRS data simply lacked the resolution to show otherwise. Hubble did not overturn a well-tested theory so much as it exposed how much those earlier models were forced to guess. Still, the gap between prediction and observation is wide enough to matter.
Standard simulations of planet growth typically assume that gas and dust feeding a young world settle into calm, axially symmetric structures fairly quickly. If a disk this large can remain this turbulent, the timelines for planet migration and mass accumulation could look significantly different. Faster or more erratic migration might be possible in a disk riddled with strong asymmetries, altering where planets ultimately park and how much material they swallow along the way.
What is driving the disorder remains an open question. The radial brightness peaks and the north-south asymmetry are consistent with gravitational perturbations from an unseen companion, perhaps an embedded protoplanet or an eccentric binary partner whose orbit stirs the disk on timescales shorter than a hundred thousand years. The SMA and NOEMA team has proposed an eccentric disk model as one explanation, but competing hypotheses, including magnetohydrodynamic instabilities and late infall of material from the surrounding molecular cloud, have not been ruled out. Sorting through these possibilities will likely require velocity-resolved molecular line maps at higher spatial resolution, a task well suited to the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA).
Important caveats
Several key uncertainties deserve attention. No direct temperature or stellar mass measurement for the central star exists outside the radiative transfer assumptions from the 2024 discovery paper. If future spectroscopic observations revise the star’s properties, the disk’s derived size and mass could shift. A more massive star would make the disk less extreme relative to its host; a lighter one could push the disk’s mass fraction toward gravitational instability.
The radial brightness peaks seen in millimeter emission could correspond to rings carved by forming planets, but they could also arise from temperature variations, changes in dust grain size, or shadowing from warped inner regions. The full calibrated Hubble data from GO 17751 have not yet entered public archives, so independent teams cannot yet reproduce the brightness measurements or test alternative interpretations. And the key preprints underpinning these results have not completed peer review.
Even the title of “largest known” is provisional. It depends on distance estimates and on where observers draw the boundary of the disk in scattered light versus emission. If future parallax measurements revise the distance to IRAS 23077+6707, its physical size could move up or down. Other very extended disks may be lurking in survey data, unrecognized because they are fainter, more face-on, or blended with background structure.
What comes next for Dracula’s Chivito
A single spectacular object cannot rewrite the broader picture of planet formation on its own. IRAS 23077+6707 may turn out to be an outlier shaped by unusual initial conditions, such as a particularly massive natal cloud or a recent gravitational encounter with another young star. The real test will come as more extended disks are imaged at comparable resolution. If similar levels of disorder appear repeatedly, theorists will need to build models in which turbulence, warps, and large-scale asymmetries are not rare exceptions but routine stages in planetary birth.
For now, Dracula’s Chivito stands as a vivid case study in what hides below the resolution limits of earlier surveys. What once looked like a smooth, anonymous smear in Pan-STARRS data now resolves into a sprawling, intricate system whose details challenge comfortable assumptions. As the unreleased Hubble observations become public and more teams dig into the data, the disk around IRAS 23077+6707 is poised to become a benchmark, not as a neat illustration of textbook theory, but as a demanding test case for how planets really take shape in a messy, dynamic universe.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
