Dark Disks Around Young Stars
Jet Propulsion Laboratory https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ Jan. 30, 2014
Herbig-Haro 30 is the prototype of a gas-rich "young stellar object" disk around a star. The dark disk spans 40 billion miles (64 billion kilometers) in this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, cutting the bright nebula in two and blocking the central star from direct view. Volunteers can help astronomers find more disks like this through DiskDetective.org, which incorporates data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
This image was taken by Hubble's former instrument, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.