AB Aurigae star. Coloured Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image of a disk of dust around the young star AB Aurigae. The black cross prevents the star's light obscuring the detail of the disk. Disks such as this are believed to be the start of solar systems like our own. Brighter knots of gas and dust are seen to the left of the star, which may be the seeds of new planets. The bright spot at lower right is a background star. The disk is extremely wide, with the black occulting bar itself obscuring 1.4 times the diameter of our solar system. Image taken in January 1999 by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph.