Hubble Reveals a Giant Cosmic 'Bat Shadow'

Shadows on Earth can be mysterious and foreboding, but when they occur in space, they can convey information we otherwise could not know. In a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, nearly 1,300 light-years away, a young star's game of shadow play is revealing secrets of its unseen planet-forming disk. The near-infrared vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured the shadow cast by the fledgling star's brilliant light being blocked by this disk.

Named HBC 672, this Sun-like star is surrounded by a debris ring of dust, rock and ice — a disk that is too small and too distant to be seen, even by Hubble. But like a little fly that wanders into the beam of a flashlight shining on a wall, its shadow is projected large upon the cloud in which it was born.

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This animation compares the appearance of the Serpens Nebula as seen from the ground — with the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory, and from space — with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Both observatories used detectors and filters observing in the near-infrared to gather their data.