Protoplanetary Discs in the Orion Nebula
Depicts: M42, NGC 1976, The Great Nebula in Orion
Copyright: Mark McCaughrean (Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy), C. Robert O'Dell (Rice University), and NASA
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These are Hubble Space Telescope images of four newly discovered protoplanetary disks around young stars in the Orion nebula, located 1,500 light-years away. Gas and dust disks, long suspected by astronomers to be an early stage of planetary formation, can be directly seen in visible light by Hubble.
Last Update: 1 September 2019