Young stars are surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets are born — but astronomers have discovered that one pair of young stars orbiting around each other has three disks, not just two.
Christian Brinch at the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile to view a system of two stars roughly 120 parsecs (391 light years) from Earth that are each surrounded by a disk. But the authors also noticed a third, larger disk surrounding the entire system. None of the disks are aligned with each other or with the orbit of the stars themselves.
This wild misalignment suggests that the stars formed from a turbulent cloud of gas, or that a third star was recently flung out of the system.
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Two stars have three disks. Nature 538, 292 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/538292b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/538292b
