Astronomers spot an extragalactic star with a disc around it for the first time

For the first time, astronomers have observed a disc around a young star in a galaxy outside of ours called Large Magellanic Cloud. This extragalactic neighbor of our home Milky Way galaxy is located almost 200,000 light-years away from Earth and could crash into our home galaxy in about two billion years.
The new observations were made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile. A massive young star in the star system HH 1177 is growing and taking in matter from its surroundings. As the matter gathers, a spinning disc called an accretion disc is forming. This is the first time that astronomers have seen an accretion disc in an extragalactic area. The discovery is described in a study published November 29 in the journal Nature.