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.

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)