The protoplanetary disk around IRAS 23077+6707, a young star located roughly 1,000 light-years away, is unexpectedly chaotic and turbulent, with wisps of material stretching much farther above and below the disk than astronomers have seen in any similar system.
This Hubble image shows a protoplanetary disk around IRAS 23077+6707. Image credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / K. Monsch, CfA / J. DePasquale, STScI.
Protoplanetary disks are dust- and gas-rich circumstellar disks present around young stars, and are expected to be the main sites in which planets form.
IRAS 23077+6707’s disk spans nearly 644 billion km (400 billion miles) — around 40 times the diameter of our Solar System to the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt of cometary bodies.
The disk obscures the star within it, which scientists believe may be either a hot, massive star, or a pair of stars.
And the enormous disk is not only the largest known planet-forming disk; it’s also shaping up to be one of the most unusual.
“The level of detail we’re seeing is rare in protoplanetary disk imaging, and the new Hubble images show that planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than we expected,” said Dr. Kristina Monsch, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics.
“We’re seeing this disk nearly edge-on and its wispy upper layers and asymmetric features are especially striking.
Both the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have glimpsed similar structures in other disks, but IRAS 23077+6707 provides us with an exceptional perspective — allowing us to trace its substructures in visible light at an unprecedented level of detail.
This makes the system a unique, new laboratory for studying planet formation and the environments where it happens.”
The edge-on disk resembles a hamburger, with a dark central lane flanked by glowing top and bottom layers of dust and gas.
The impressive height of these features wasn’t the only thing that captured the attention of scientists.
The new images revealed that vertically imposing filament-like features appear on just one side of the disk, while the other side appears to have a sharp edge and no visible filaments.
This peculiar, lopsided structure suggests that dynamic processes, like the recent infall of dust and gas, or interactions with its surroundings, are shaping the disk.
“We were stunned to see how asymmetric this disk is,” said Dr. Joshua Bennett Lovell, also from the Harvard & Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics.
“Hubble has given us a front row seat to the chaotic processes that are shaping disks as they build new planets — processes that we don’t yet fully understand but can now study in a whole new way.”
All planetary systems form from disks of gas and dust encircling young stars.
Over time, the gas accretes onto the star, and planets emerge from the remaining material.
IRAS 23077+6707 may represent a scaled-up version of our early Solar System, with a disk mass estimated at 10 to 30 times that of Jupiter — ample material for forming multiple gas giants.
This, plus the new findings, makes it an exceptional case for studying the birth of planetary systems.
“In theory, IRAS 23077+6707 could host a vast planetary system,” Dr. Monsch said.
“While 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 are a starting point for understanding how planets form over time and in different environments.”
The findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.
_____
Kristina Monsch et al. 2025. Hubble reveals complex multi-scale structure in the edge-on protoplanetary disk IRAS 23077+6707. ApJ, in press; arXiv: 2510.11819
