ExploraTour: A Peek into the Lives of the Stars
Another Star-Birth Cloud
This is a view of the Orion Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a giant gas cloud within which a large number of new stars have recently been formed (~300,000 years ago, around the time when cavemen roamed the Earth).
Hubble was able to resolve disks of dust and gas surrounding some of the young stars.
It is thought that planets may form from the material contained in these disks,so they are called protoplanetary disks or "proplyds".
Click below for some close-up views of proplyds taken by Hubble.