esahubble_opo0113e April 26th, 2001
Credit: NASA/ESA, J. Bally (University of Colorado, Boulder, CO), H. Throop (Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO), C.R. O'Dell (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN)
Planet formation is a hazardous process. These four snapshots, taken by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, show dust disks around embryonic stars in the Orion Nebula being 'blowtorched' by a blistering flood of ultraviolet radiation from the region's brightest star. Within these disks are the seeds of planets. The doomed systems look like hapless comets, with wayward tails of gas boiling off the withering, pancake-shaped disks.
Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA
Image Source: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo0113e/
Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, Germany
Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Detailed color mapping information coming soon...
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