Figure 8-8: R I V U X G

Protoplanetary Disks (a) The Orion Nebula is a star-forming region located some 1500 light-years from Earth. It is the middle “star” in Orion’s “sword” (see Figure 2-2a). The smaller, bluish nebula is the object shown in Figure 8-3. (b) This view of the center of the Orion Nebula is a mosaic of Hubble Space Telescope images. The four insets are false-color close-ups of four protoplanetary disks that lie within the nebula. A young, recently formed star is at the center of each disk. (The disk at upper right is seen nearly edge-on.) The inset at the lower left shows the size of our own solar system for comparison.

(a: Anglo-Australian Observatory image by David Malin; b: C. R. O’Dell and S. K. Wong, Rice University; NASA)