A planet eats a disk while the disk eats a nebula. It’s eating all the way down

Astronomers have found what may be a very weird case of a young star and planet forming in a dense cloud of gas and dust about 500 light years away. The young system is forming in a disk, which is common enough, but in this case the disk itself appears to still be forming from gas falling into it from the surrounding nebula!

The nebula is called Barnard 59 (or B59), a dense, cold knot of gas and dust called a molecular cloud. In this case, it’s part of the remarkable Pipe Nebula, a complex of d...