About 1,000 light-years away from Earth, a huge disk of gas and dust is swirling around a young star and giving birth to new planets. It’s not just the biggest disk that forms the planet astronomers found, its behavior is different than anything seen before.

The disk spans nearly 400 billion miles (640 billion kilometers)—that’s about 40 times wider than our entire solar system. While it was first identified in 2016, astronomers are now using NASA Hubble Space Telescope to capture the first image of this planetary nursery in visible light. The new images reveal an unusually chaotic environment, with chunks of material farther above and below the disk than expected. Surprisingly, these extended filaments are concentrated in only one part of the disk.

The team published its findings on December 23 at The Astrophysical Journal, including a nickname for the mysterious space object: “Dracula’s Chivito,” a nod to the heritage of two of the explorers, one from Transylvania (home of Dracula) and one from Uruguay (home of the chivito, an iconic beefsteak sandwich). Viewed from the side, the planet-forming disk resembles a sandwich, with a dark central channel surrounded by white upper and lower layers of gas and dust.

“The level of detail we’re seeing is rare protoplanetary disk imagingand these new Hubble images show that planetary nurseries may be more active and chaotic than we expected,” Kristina Monsch, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA), a collaboration between Stanford University and the Smithsonian, told NASA. statement.

“We see this disk close to the surface and the thin surface layers and asymmetric features are very striking,” he added.

A twisted celestial sandwich

All planets form from disks of gas and dust that surround young stars. Astronomers have long believed that these protoplanetary disks were relatively smooth, peaceful environments where planets gradually coalesced over millions of years. Recent studies have challenged that assumption, pointing to the greater complexity and diversity of these systems. Hubble’s new image of Dracula’s Chivito adds to this growing body of evidence.

“We were surprised to see how asymmetric this disk is,” co-author Joshua Bennett Lovell, also an astronomer at CfA, said in the statement. “Hubble gives us a front-row seat to the chaotic processes that shape disks as they build new planets—processes we don’t yet fully understand but can now study in a new way.”

The fact that the extended filaments of Chivito’s Dracula are visible only on one side suggests that dynamical processes—such as gas and dust falling into the disc, or other interactions with space outside it—are shaping the celestial sandwich.

A model for the early solar system

The disk harbors a young star (or stars) within it, but researchers believe it could harbor either a massive, hot star or a binary pair. The disk itself has 10 to 30 times the mass of Jupiter, which means there is enough material to form many gas giant planets. As such, Dracula’s Chivito is an enlarged model of what our solar system looked like 4.6 billion years ago.

“In theory, (Dracula’s Chivito) could host a vast planetary system,” Monsch said. “While planet formation can vary in such large environments, the underlying processes are likely the same. Right now, we have more questions than answers, but these new images are a starting point for understanding how planets form over time and in different environments.”

Dracula’s Chivito is therefore a natural laboratory for the study of planet formation, Monsch said. Hubble and other space telescopes, such as NASA’s James Webb, will continue to observe this unusual disk to learn what forms its unique structure.