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Dark Disks Around Young Stars

Jan. 30, 2014
This image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows Herbig-Haro 30, the prototype of a gas-rich 'young stellar object' disk around a star.

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.

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