Before Hubble took a look, other telescopes had spied protoplanetary disks around just four (of the estimated 400 billion) stars in our Milky Way galaxy. But these disks were old, and didn’t necessarily form when the star did. Hubble’s photo shows directly that the dust around a newborn star is spinning too quickly to be sucked into the stellar inferno; instead, it naturally spreads out into the sort of pancake that can break into planets one day. The next trick will be to find unequivocal evidence of actual planets-preferably, without waiting for ET to tell us where to look.
