In the Orion Nebula lies a host of bizarre, teardrop-shaped objects. They look like strange comets, but are in fact evaporating, planet-forming disks around young stars. Astronomers are perplexed by the existence of these disks, because they should have been destroyed long ago.
This puzzling nature, however, makes them enticing targets for study — and a new image, taken by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile, has done just that. This image brightly showcases one of these peculiar objects, designated 177-341 W.
