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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Hubble Space Telescope discovered four protoplanetary disks around young stars in the Orion nebula, located 1,500 light-years away. This is one of them. 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