quick facts
What it is: HD 61005, a Sun-like star nicknamed “Moth”
Where is it: About 117 light years away in the constellation Puppis
When it was shared: 23 February 2026
The sun orbits around the middle of The Milky Way wrapped in a protective bubble of its own making, called the heliosphere. And for the first time, astronomers have seen a similar protective bubble forming around an alien star.
A star called HD 61005 has just been confirmed to have its own heliosphere, or “astrosphere.” And since HD 61005 is much younger than the Sun (about 100 million years compared to 4.6 billion years), the discovery also gives astronomers a rare glimpse into what our home star may have looked like in its infancy.
This groundbreaking image uses X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple and white in the image) along with infrared (blue and white) and optical (red, green and blue) observations from other telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Combining the data has enabled astronomers to capture a striking portrait of a stellar wind bubble in action.
In the center of the image is a brilliant white X-ray core. Around it is a neon-purple glow that marks the astrosphere itself.
One of HD 61005’s most distinctive features is a wedge-shaped dust tail behind it that looks like a pair of wings. This debris, left over from star formation, has been swept backwards as the star hurtles through space, and its unusual shape has earned HD 61005 the nickname “Moth”.
“There is a saying that a moth is drawn to a flame,” Brad Snios, a physicist formerly of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement. “In the case of HD 61005, the ‘moth’ cannot easily escape from the flame because it was born around it.”
Although similar in mass and temperature to the Sun, HD 61005 is far younger and more active. Its stellar winds are estimated to be about three times faster and 25 times denser than those currently emitted by the Sun. If it replaced the sun in the solar system, our heliosphere would be up to 10 times wider, according to NASA.
Capturing the first alien astrosphere has been an ongoing mission since the 1990s. The breakthrough was made possible because HD 61005’s powerful wind collides with an unusually dense region of interstellar material, generating X-rays detectable by Chandra.
It’s the first clue to what might have surrounded the early solar system billions of years ago — and perhaps how young planetary systems are developing in their cosmic neighborhood.
