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What we're looking at here is one of the first images that Hubble took,

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trying to answer the question
of how common is planet formation?

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Thirty objects in the Orion star forming
region that has lots of stars in formation,

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a young system.

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Each one of these is
an example of material around a young star

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that looks to be forming
a planetary system.

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We know the material
there is consistent with what planets

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formed from in our solar system.

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And now what we're seeing is evidence
that there are disks of material

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in this case, the disk is absorbing
the light coming from behind.

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It's a shadow, basically.
There's another one.

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In other cases, the light from the star
itself is lighting up the disk.

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So this is a really tantalizing image.

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In the early days of Hubble,
it was showing us

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that when we really took a peering
look at what we could do with Hubble

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at protoplanetary systems,
it started to see disks everywhere

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that looked like
they could be forming planetary systems.

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One of the most exciting things
about this composite image in my mind

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is the diversity of young systems
that are forming planets.

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When Hubble launched,
the only real observational database

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we had to infer planet
formation models was our own solar system.

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We've got the four rocky planets,
the interior, terrestrial planets,

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Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

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And then you've got the gas giants
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

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And then you've got a whole bunch
of comets, asteroids, smaller bodies.

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So having all that stuff here
in our solar system

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allowed us to come up with planet
formation models.

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The only thing we could really test
them on was our own solar system.

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Now, let's fast forward to today.

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We now know that there's a planet around
every star in general, at least one.

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We've discovered so many planets

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we can use Hubble
to look at their atmospheres,

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which is something that was never,
ever designed to do.

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Look at an atmosphere
of a planet outside of our solar system.

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And look in detail at these disks
to start to tease

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out the fingerprints and atmospheres
of planets around other stars.

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It's kind of mind blowing.

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And that's been a really exciting area
of astrophysics since Hubble launched.

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So the thing that's really cool
about this image, it was sort of

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like the beginning of putting the pieces
together, observationally

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of exoplanet science, planet
formation around stars other than the sun.