IRAS 23077+6707 is a disc located around 1,000 light-years from Earth. This disc has been nicknamed ‘Dracula’s Chivito’ as a nod to the heritage of its two researchers: one is from Transylvania and the other is from Uruguay, where the chivito sandwich is the national dish.

It is a large sandwich, this one. At nearly 400 billion miles across, Dracula’s Chivito is about 40 times the diameter of our solar system. Dense clouds of dust and gas cause the top and bottom of it to glow, and NASA scientists think that its filling is either a single hot young star or a pair of fledgling stars. It is a particularly chaotic protoplanetary disc, or ‘planet nursery’. While cloud systems in our skies give us water to drink, deep-space cloud systems like this are busy serving up entire new planetary systems.