Hubble Probes the Great Orion Nebula

A NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a region of the Great Nebula in Orion, as imaged by the Wale Field Planetary Camera 2.

This is one of the nearest regions of very recent star formation (300,000 years ago). The nebula is a giant gas cloud illuminated by the brightest of the young hot stars at the top of the picture. Many of the fainter young stars are surrounded by disks of dust and gas, that are slightly more than twice the diameter of the solar system (or 100 Astronomical Units in diameter).