These are Hubble Space Telescope images of four newly discovered protoplanetary disks around young stars in the Orion nebula, located 1, 500 light-years away. 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.

Credit: Mark McCaughrean (Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy), C. Robert O'Dell (Rice University), and NASA/ESA