M42 – Orion Nebula protoplanetary disks

Resembling an interstellar Frisbee, the dark feature in these two Hubble images is a protoplanetary disk of dust seen edge-on around a newborn star in M42. The two images show the disk through two different sets of filters: one to probe the disk’s chemical composition (left) and another to reduce the brightness of the nebula, revealing brighter regions above and below the disk that betray the presence of the star (right). Because the disk is edge-on, its star is largely hidden, but the disk may be an embryonic planetary system in the making. Our solar system probably formed out of such a disk 4.5 billion years ago.