Spinning Stardust into Planets

A computerized animation simulates the formation of a stellar disk and planets. Ten images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) show young stellar disks (taken with the Near-Infrared Camera Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS)) and stellar disks around young stars (taken with the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2)). Dr. Deborah Padgett describes what astronomers see in the images of young stellar disks and Dr. Karl Stapelfeldt explains HST's role in helping astronomers to examine young stars in order to understand how solar systems like our own may form.