The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (top) and infrared NICMOS images of the young star DG Tauri B INTERACTIVE: Hubble planet formation gallery QUICKTIME: NASA animation: spinning stardust into planets 1.7 MB / 240x180 QuickTime movie Please enable Javascript

February 9, 1999
Web posted at: 6:21 p.m. EST (2321 GMT)

(CNN) -- Pictures of eerie disks of dust encircling young stars are giving astronomers a new look at what may be the early stages of planetary systems forming.

The images don't actually show planets, but they suggest what it looked like when our solar system began to form around the sun 4.5 billion years ago.

Stars form in the center of a disk of dust and gas. As the star is coming together at the center, gas jets shoot away from the disk. The tiny dust particles that form the disk begin to stick together like snowballs. As they get bigger, their gravity pulls more material to them, and they become planets.

The Hubble images show young stars in the constellation Taurus, 450 light-years from Earth. They are the best images so far of the process of disks turning into planetary systems.

"While the existence of these disks has been known from prior infrared and radio observations, the Hubble images reveal important new details, such as a disk's size, shape, thickness and orientation," said Deborah Padgett of the California Institute of Technology.

The new pictures make the infant stars look rather like butterflies with brilliant wings and dark bodies. The dark-looking portions are where the star's dust disk has gotten between the star and the Hubble camera.

Until the Hubble telescope was available, it was very hard to see the disks, because the newborn stars at the center were so much brighter.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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