We report the serendipitous discovery of a large edge-on protoplanetary disk associated with the infrared source IRAS 23077+6707. The disk's apparent size in the Pan-STARRS (PS1) images is ~11", making this one of the largest known disks on the sky. It is likely a young system, still surrounded by the envelope which is very faint but still visible in the PS1 images in the northern part (alternatively this structure could be filaments from the disk itself). We use the PS1 magnitudes and other available photometric data to construct the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the disk. An optical spectrum indicates that the obscured star is hot, most likely late A. We adopt a distance of 300 pc for this object based on Gaia DR3 extinctions. We model the system using the HOCHUNK3D radiative transfer software and find that the system is consistent with a hot star of effective temperature 8000 K surrounded by a disk of size 1650 AU and mass 0.2 M_solar at inclination 82 degrees.
@article{arxiv.2402.01063,
title = {Dracula's Chivito: discovery of a large edge-on protoplanetary disk with Pan-STARRS},
author = {Ciprian T. Berghea and Ammar Bayyari and Michael L. Sitko and Jeremy J. Drake and Ana Mosquera and Cecilia Garraffo and Thomas Petit and Ray W. Russell and Korash D. Assani},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.01063},
year = {2024}
}