Here you see a pair of protoplanetary discs ('proplyds' for short) forming inside the vast star factory known as the Orion Nebula. The Hubble Space Telescope actually photographed these objects, which will one day become stars and, perhaps, planetary...

This classic space art example was commissioned for one of my recent books, Cosmic Menagerie: A Visual Journey Through the Universe. It imagines the view from the surface of a rocky world orbiting a blue giant star. These, such as Rigel in Orion, hav...

... e clip. Practically every star you can see in the night sky is contained within this dot. The yellow line, meanwhile, is the Orion arm, which is our local spiral arm. Actually it's a minor arm, a fragment rather than a complete structure. Please lik ...