What we're looking at here is one of the first images that Hubble took,
trying to answer the question of how common is planet formation?
Thirty objects in the Orion star forming region that has lots of stars in formation,
a young system.
Each one of these is an example of material around a young star
that looks to be forming a planetary system.
We know the material there is consistent with what planets
formed from in our solar system.
And now what we're seeing is evidence that there are disks of material
in this case, the disk is absorbing the light coming from behind.
It's a shadow, basically. There's another one.
In other cases, the light from the star itself is lighting up the disk.
So this is a really tantalizing image.
In the early days of Hubble, it was showing us
that when we really took a peering look at what we could do with Hubble
at protoplanetary systems, it started to see disks everywhere
that looked like they could be forming planetary systems.
One of the most exciting things about this composite image in my mind
is the diversity of young systems that are forming planets.
When Hubble launched, the only real observational database
we had to infer planet formation models was our own solar system.
We've got the four rocky planets, the interior, terrestrial planets,
Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
And then you've got the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
And then you've got a whole bunch of comets, asteroids, smaller bodies.
So having all that stuff here in our solar system
allowed us to come up with planet formation models.
The only thing we could really test them on was our own solar system.
Now, let's fast forward to today.
We now know that there's a planet around every star in general, at least one.
We've discovered so many planets
we can use Hubble to look at their atmospheres,
which is something that was never, ever designed to do.
Look at an atmosphere of a planet outside of our solar system.
And look in detail at these disks to start to tease
out the fingerprints and atmospheres of planets around other stars.
It's kind of mind blowing.
And that's been a really exciting area of astrophysics since Hubble launched.
So the thing that's really cool about this image, it was sort of
like the beginning of putting the pieces together, observationally
of exoplanet science, planet formation around stars other than the sun.