A team of astronomers has discovered an enormous protostellar disk, a vast disk of moving gas within the Milky Way’s Centre, which are key components in star formation. These disks generally feed gas into protostars from the environment and therefore, it serves as stellar fuel to facilitate young stars to grow into huge, bright suns over countless years. The team of astronomers together had determined how its spiral arms were shaped in such a way and what seems to be a miniature spiral galaxy, moving daintily around one giant star.

Well, it seemed that the star was placed about 26,000 light-years from Earth close to the dense and dust-covered galactic center which is about 32 times as large as the sun, and thus, sits among this disk which contains a diameter of regarding 4,000 astronomical units, forming O-type star.

Using the high-definition observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile, the researchers found that the disk does not seem to be moving in a way that would provide it with a natural spiral form. Rather, the disk seems to be agitated by a near-collision with a neighboring object. The object close to the disk is presumed to be the mysterious triple-sun-sized object that is still visible near it.

To check this hypothesis, the team calculated a dozen potential orbits for the mysterious object, then simulated to look if any of these orbits may have brought the object close enough to the protostellar disk to whip it into a spiral. They found that if the object followed one specific path, it could have skimmed past the disk about 12,000 years ago, perturbing the dust enough to lead to the vivid spiral form seen these days.

According to the researchers, as the middle of the Milky Way Galaxy is quite denser with stars than our neck of the galaxy, it's seemingly that near-miss events like this occur within the galactic center pretty frequently. That means our galaxy's center is also full of miniature spirals, which all are solely waiting to be discovered.