Herbig-Haro objects are some of the rarer sights in the night sky, taking the form of thin spindly jets of matter floating amongst the surrounding gas and stars.
Data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have revealed an expanding cloud of dust produced in a collision between two large bodies orbiting the bright nearby star Fomalhaut. This is the first time such a catastrophic event around another star has been imaged.
Appearing like a winged fairy-tale creature poised on a pedestal, this object is actually a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. The soaring tower is 9.5 light-years or about 90 trillion kilometres high, about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star.
This image shows a gas giant planet circling the two red dwarf stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8 000 light-years away. The planet - with a mass similar to Saturn - orbits the two stars at a distance of roughly 480 million kilometres. The two red dwarf stars are a mere 11 million kilometres apart