Artist's 3d impression of the disc around the young star HL Tauri

5 November, 2014 / Read time: 1 minute

This video shows an artist’s three-dimensional impression of the disc around the young star HL Tauri as seen using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This star is located in Taurus constellation, around 450 light years from Earth.

HL Tauri is a T Tauri-type protostar, which means it hasn't started his main sequence. As can be seen in the video, we can observe a protoplanetary disk around a core, from the material in the disc — mostly gas and fine dust — planets are forming and sweeping up the surrounding material to create dark gaps and ring structures in this disc.

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser