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Few_Carpenter_9185 t1_j05m8gn wrote

This is probably one of the best images, in terms of something that makes sense to the human eye.

There's many newer and better ones from a scientific standpoint, but they're all false-color and very "computery" looking. And often have a big blocked circle in the center to keep the light from the protostar from washing out the disk around it that may be forming planets.

It's a protostar and gas & dust disk with a backdrop of the Orion nebula. It's sort of what you'd see if you were in a spaceship parked a light year away or so, in a dark cabin with a big window.

Protostar and protoplanetary disk.

The dark black donut is the protostellar and protoplanetary disk. The red glow in the center is either the protostar in the center, lit from its collapse, or a newly born star that's ignited main-sequence fusion, and hasn't yet pushed the disk away out into space with light and stellar wind.

The black donut is probably much bigger than the orbit of Neptune in our own Solar System. The time-scale to see the process would be much longer than any semblance of recorded human history.

Although, it's roughly what your eyes would see in that spaceship cabin with the big window... if you had eyeballs the size of grapefruit, like a Japanese cartoon Anime girl, and could stare perfectly still for several minutes or hours and build up an image without blinking, or otherwise spazzing out and going all doki-doki bakka over the need to confess your love for senpai... and maybe some ultraviolet and near-infrared light thrown in.

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