Exoplanets
Protoplanetary Discs in the Orion Nebula
November 20, 1995 · ESA/Hubble · Messier 42 , NGC 1976 , Orion Proplyd · Orion
Zoom to full resolution See where it is in the 3D sky Original on ESA/Hubble ↗
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.