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Accretion disk: Quick Facts

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Facts

Also Known As accretion disc • nebular disk

Photos and Videos

dust disk around black hole in NGC 4261
An accretion disk that might be producing planets around a young star named HD 141569A, in an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The star lies some 320 light-years from Earth. The photograph has been modified to simulate what the disk would look like if viewed from above, and false colours were added to better show the disk's structure. To reveal the disk, the star's light was blocked out, so a black central region appears in place of the star. A nearby double-star system appears at upper left.
Images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope of four protoplanetary disks around young stars in the Orion Nebula.
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