Planet-forming discs in the Orion cloud

Planet-forming discs around young stars and their location within the gas-rich cloud of Orion, roughly 1600 light-years from Earth. The mesmerising images of the discs were captured using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). In total, the team observed 23 stars in the Orion region, detecting planet-forming discs around 10 of them. The uneven appearance of some of the discs in this region might suggest that massive planets are embedded within them, since these could cause the discs to warp and become misaligned. The background image shows an infrared view of Orion captured by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite.