February 11, 1999
Every year, the Earth returns to the same point in its orbit where it was when you were born.
A Disk and Jet in Haro 6-5B
Birthday · February 11, 1999
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
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APOD published February 11, 1999. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Planets condense from disks. Several new Hubble Space Telescope pictures of stars surrounded by disks were released earlier this week. Since the glare of the central star usually makes a surrounding disk hard to see, prior observations in radio and infrared light were used to isolate systems where the disk was edge-on, blocking much of the central starlight. One such disk system, Haro 6-5B, is shown above in false color. Here, the central disk confines the emitted light into an hourglass shape. Complex dust clouds appear dark. A powerful protruding jet is shown in green. This budding planetary system measures 0.2 light-years across. Quite possibly, our own Solar System looked like this about 5 billion years ago.