Baby star seen eating 'space hamburger'

WASHINGTON - For the first time, researchers say they have captured a clear image of a baby star eating what looks like a dusty "space hamburger".

This new image, captured with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile and described Wednesday in the US journal Science Advances, confirmed the formation of a disk of gas and dust around a new star.

"The disk is nearly edge-on and has a radius of about 60 AUs (astronomical unit)," Chin-Fei Lee, a researcher at Taipei-based Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and colleagues said in a statement.