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. They are the best images so far of the process of disks turning into planetary systems. The new pictures make the infant stars look rather like butterflies with brilliant wings and dark bodies.