Bat Shadow

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope near-infrared vision captured a remarkable image of a young star's unseen, planet-forming disk casting a huge shadow across a more distant cloud in a star-forming region. The star is called HBC 672, and the shadow feature was nicknamed the "Bat Shadow" because it resembles a pair of wings. In a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, nearly 1,300 light-years away, a young star’s game of shadow play is revealing secrets of its unseen planet-forming disk. This Sun-like star is surrounded by a debris ring of dust, rock, and ice—a disk that is too small and too distant to be seen, even by Hubble. But its shadow is projected large upon the cloud in which it was born. The Bat Shadow spans approximately 200 times the length of our solar system. It is visible in the upper right portion of the picture.