This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the largest planet-forming disk ever observed around a young star. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Kristina Monsch (CfA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))

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What it is: IRAS 23077+6707, the largest planet-forming disk ever observed

Where it is: 978 light-years away, in the constellation Cepheus

When it was shared: Dec. 23, 2026

Rich in gas and dust, a protoplanetary disk is where planets — both rocky worlds, like Earth, and gas giants, like Jupiter — can form around young stars. Dracula's Chivito could, in theory, contain a vast planetary system. Its name references both its appearance and its discoverers, who come from Transylvania, Romania (home of the fictional Dracula), and Uruguay, where the national dish is the chivito, a sandwich of sliced beef, ham, mozzarella, tomatoes and olives — which resembles the layers of gas and dust in the protoplanetary disk.

In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, astronomers estimate that the cosmic sandwich spans nearly 400 billion miles (640 billion kilometers) — more than 100 times the diameter of our inner solar system, where all the known planets orbit. Tilted nearly edge-on as seen from Earth, the object was first identified in 2016 and has now been confirmed as a massive planet-forming disk.

Thought to contain a hot, massive star or a pair of stars at its center, the enormous disk is surprisingly chaotic, with bright wisps of material seen far above and below the disk.

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"The level of detail we're seeing is rare in protoplanetary disk imaging," Kristina Monsch, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. "These new Hubble images show that planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than we expected."

The system contains bright, vertically stretched filaments of gas on only one side, while the opposite side has a sharp edge.