Hubble Space Telescope discovered four protoplanetary disks around young stars in the Orion nebula, located 1, 500 light-years away. This is one of them. 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