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About 1,000 light years from Earth, a gigantic disk of gas and dust swirls around a young star and gives birth to new planets. Not only is it the biggest planet forming disk astronomers have ever discovered, its behavior is different from that observed before.
The disk spans nearly 400 billion miles (640 billion kilometers), or about 40 times wider than our entire solar system. Although it was first identified in 2016, astronomers now use NASA data. Hubble Space Telescope to capture the first image of this planetary nursery in visible light. The new images revealed an unusually chaotic environment, with streaks of material extending farther above and below the disk than expected. Strangely, these extended filaments are concentrated on only one side of the disk.
The team published its findings on December 23 in The Journal of Astrophysics, including a nickname for the puzzling space object: “Dracula’s Chivito,” a nod to the heritage of two of the researchers, one from Transylvania (home of Dracula) and the other from Uruguay (home of the chivito, an iconic beef steak sandwich). Viewed from the side, the disk forming the planet looks like a sandwich, with a dark central band flanked by white upper and lower layers of gas and dust.
“The level of detail we observe is rare in protoplanetary disk imagingand these new Hubble images show that planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than expected,” Kristina Monsch, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA), a collaboration between Stanford University and the Smithsonian, said in a NASA statement. statement.
“We see this disk almost edge-on and its wispy upper layers and asymmetrical features are particularly striking,” she added.
An Unbalanced Heavenly Sandwich
All planets form from disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars. Astronomers have long believed that these protoplanetary disks constitute relatively orderly and serene environments where planets gradually merge over millions of years. Recent studies have challenged this assumption, highlighting greater complexity and diversity between these systems. Hubble’s new image of Dracula’s Chivito adds to this growing body of evidence.
“We were amazed at how asymmetrical this disk is,” co-author Joshua Bennett Lovell, also an astronomer at CfA, said in the release. “Hubble has given us a front-row seat to observe the chaotic processes that shape disks as they build new planets – processes that we don’t yet fully understand but can now study in a whole new way.”
The fact that the extended filaments of Dracula’s Chivito appear on only one side suggests that dynamic processes, such as the fall of gas and dust into the disk, or other interactions with outer space, shape the celestial sandwich.
A model for the first solar system
The disk obscures the young star(s) it contains, but researchers think it could host either a single hot, massive star or a binary pair. The disk itself contains 10 to 30 times more mass than Jupiter, meaning there is enough material to form several gas giant planets. As such, Dracula’s Chivito is essentially a larger-scale model of what our solar system looked like 4.6 billion years ago.
“Theoretically, [Dracula’s Chivito] could host a large planetary system,” Monsch said. “Although planet formation may differ in such massive environments, the underlying processes are likely similar. Right now we have more questions than answers, but these new images provide a starting point for understanding how planets form over time and in different environments. »
Dracula’s Chivito is therefore a natural laboratory for studying the formation of planets, explains Monsch. Hubble and other space telescopes, such as NASA’s James Webb, will continue to observe this unique disk to discover what shapes its bizarre structure.
