NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has put together a striking new collection of images that offers a rare, detailed look at protoplanetary disks—swirling rings of gas and dust that can eventually become planets. By combining views captured in visible light and infrared light, this set of observations highlights different stages of star formation and gives scientists more clues about how young stars grow and how planetary systems begin.
The collection features eight protoplanetary disks in total. Four are shown in visible light, where the disks appear as dark, narrow lanes cutting across bright surrounding glow. These dark bands are dense dust disks seen against a luminous backdrop, making them stand out clearly. In one case, a disk labeled HH 390 isn’t viewed perfectly edge-on, which is why it looks offset—appearing closer to the edge of the bright region rather than slicing through the center.
That bright glow comes from what’s known as a reflection nebula, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by nearby starlight. In the visible-light scenes, Hubble also captures jets of gas flowing outward—dramatic signatures of active young stars. Two of the objects, HH 390 and Tau 042021, are located roughly 450 light-years away in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, a well-known stellar nursery. The lower pair of young stars in the visible-light set sits farther away, nearly 500 light-years from Earth, in the Chameleon I star-forming region.
The other four disks are shown in infrared light, and they tell a slightly different story. These stars appear to be at an earlier point in their development, still wrapped in a thick cocoon of dust called an envelope. Visible light can’t easily pass through this dense material, which is why the stars and structures behind it can be hard to detect in standard images. Infrared light, however, can pierce that dust far more effectively, revealing what’s happening in these heavily veiled environments.
In the infrared views, the protoplanetary disks again show up as dark central regions set against brighter surroundings. Interestingly, the disks can look larger than they truly are because they cast long shadows across the nearby dust clouds, creating a dramatic silhouette effect that magnifies their apparent size.
These infrared targets also span some of the most famous stellar nurseries in the sky. Two of the stars—those at the top right and bottom left—are located in the Orion Molecular Cloud about 1,300 light-years away. The remaining pair—top left and bottom right—lies within the Perseus Molecular Cloud, around 1,500 light-years from Earth.
Together, the visible and infrared images provide a more complete picture of how protoplanetary disks form, evolve, and shape their surroundings. Since these disks are the raw material for future planets, studying them helps researchers piece together the early steps that can ultimately lead to solar systems like our own.
