If you love the mysteries of space, this story is for you. In a study published last month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers at the University of Arizona made a major discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope. They caught a visible-light glimpse of a gargantuan, 93-billion-mile-long cosmic dust feature dubbed the “Cat’s Tail,” sitting just 63 light-years away in the Beta Pictoris system.If you’re trying to wrap your brain around that scale, this thing is roughly 1,000 astronomical units long, long enough to wrap between the Earth and the Sun about 500 times. If I put it in the only measurable terms Americans are familiar with, it would be about 1.3 billion American football fields, endzones included.NASAHubble Just Revealed a Massive Structure in Space That Scientists Can’t Fully ExplainUp until now, this space anomaly was only visible to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in infrared. Lead researcher Arin Avsar explained that the tail managed to duck visible-light detection for so long because it’s composed almost entirely of heavily carbon-based organic refractory material, meaning it’s made of long chains of black carbon atoms that swallow visible light whole.You’re probably wondering how a 93-billion-mile trail of pitch-black, porous soot even gets created in the first place. Researchers studying it don’t have a concrete answer, but think it might have something to do with two Pluto -sized planetoids slamming into each other at preposterous speeds, creating an incomprehensible degree of heat that vaporizes carbon into gas, which eventually cooled down into these fluffy porous patches of cosmic dust wafting through its solar system.Using 14 years of Hubble data alongside JWST’s infrared scans, the team mapped the tail in 3D and found it actually stretches sideways in space rather than trailing behind the star. They also spotted a weird gravitational warp in the dust halo caused by Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant ten times the size of Jupiter that has an intense gravitational pull. Think of it like that old middle school science class trick of using static electricity to curve water as it pours from a faucet.All this sounds extraordinary, but it provides a glimpse into how our own celestial neighborhood likely formed several billion years ago.The post There’s a 93-Billion-Mile Structure in Space, and Astronomers Can’t Fully Explain It appeared first on VICE.