December 23, 2025
Space burger, hold the garlic
'Dracula's Chivito': Hubble reveals largest birthplace of planets ever observed
Internet loses it over Hubble’s giant “space hamburger”
TLDR: Hubble spotted the biggest planet‑forming disk ever, a chaotic “space hamburger” with one‑sided filaments. Comments split between sandwich jokes, Uruguayan pride, and “less marketing, more science” vibes, with paper‑linkers chiming in—big, messy disks matter because they show how planets grow in extreme conditions.
The internet just met Hubble’s newest cosmic snack: a colossal, chaotic planet‑making disk nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito.” Astronomers say this mega‑nursery sits about 1,000 light‑years away and stretches nearly 400 billion miles, big enough to cook up multiple gas giants. It’s so huge and oddly lopsided—with wispy filaments popping up on only one side—that scientists are calling it a wild new lab for understanding how planets actually form. Think of a protoplanetary disk as a giant pancake of dust and gas around a baby star; Hubble caught this one edge‑on, so it looks like a glowing burger with a dark middle. For the serious crowd, one commenter dropped the paper link in The Astrophysical Journal: source.
But the comments? Pure chaos and comedy. One user deadpanned, “Why does Dracula need a Uruguayan steak sandwich?” while others flooded in with hamburger memes and vampire puns. Uruguayan pride jumped in fast—“I knew a compatriot was involved!”—turning the thread into a mini national celebration. Then came the drama: skeptics grumbled about cutesy names and NASA marketing, while science fans said fun nicknames bring new people to astronomy. Hubble vs. Webb fans traded friendly jabs (visible light vs. infrared), and everyone tried to wrap their heads around a disk 40 times wider than our solar system. Verdict: the universe is messy, the internet is hungry, and this space burger is the main course.
Key Points
- •Hubble imaged IRAS 23077+6707, the largest known protoplanetary disk, about 1,000 light-years from Earth.
- •Visible-light images show a chaotic, turbulent disk with wispy material far above and below the plane.
- •A puzzling asymmetry shows extended filaments on one side only; the other side has a sharp edge with no filaments.
- •The disk spans ~400 billion miles and has an estimated mass of 10–30 Jupiter masses, enough to form multiple gas giants.
- •Findings published in The Astrophysical Journal; researchers from CfA emphasize the edge-on view’s unique detail, with context from JWST observations.