Researchers have revealed two images of planetary systems forming around their home stars using a new image processing technique. According to NASA, the images are “two treasures that were hiding in the Hubble archives.”
The forming planetary systems were discovered by a team led by Rémi Soummer—from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Initially the stars were captured by the Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer in 1999 and 2006.
The space agency says that “when Hubble first viewed the stars no disks were detected.” Soummer and his team used “improvements in image processing, including algorithms used for face-recognition software”to analyze the images again, obtaining these pictures of the disk, which you can see reinterpreted by an artist at the bottom.
You can see more pictures below:
