#OTD 30 years ago, 20 November 1995, Bob O'Dell & I released these Hubble images of protoplanetary disks around young stars, seen as silhouettes against the bright background of the Orion Nebula ✨🔭

[markmccaughrean@mastodon.social]

#OTD 30 years ago, 20 November 1995, Bob O'Dell & I released these Hubble images of protoplanetary disks around young stars, seen as silhouettes against the bright background of the Orion Nebula

Given the beautiful disk images made since with Hubble, SPHERE, GPI, ALMA, JWST, & other instruments, it's hard to imagine that some eminent astronomers at the time didn't believe that disks like these existed 🤨

These pictures changed everything 🥳

Tempus fugit, indeed

https://science.nasa.gov/asset/hubble/planetary-systems-in-the-making-dust-and-gas-disks-around-young-stars-in-orion-nebula/

[markmccaughrean@mastodon.social]

There's a certain circularity (sorry) to this anniversary – the images were released when I was a staff member at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy @mpi_astro in Heidelberg, & thirty years later, I'm back here again as an adjunct scientist.

[markmccaughrean@mastodon.social]

And among the million projects I'm working on is JWST imaging of these & other disks in Orion – indeed, the publication of these Hubble images & the corresponding paper certainly played a significant role in my getting involved with NGST/JWST just three years later, in 1998.

Here's the paper that I wrote with Bob O'Dell based on these images: it came out a few months later, in 1996:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1996AJ....111.1977M/abstract