Proplyds are thought to be young planet systems in the making. As newborn stars emerge from the nebulous gas and dust of star-forming regions like the heart of the Orion Nebula, discs form around them.
The "proplyds" or protoplanetary , as these systems are called, seem to be a few (about 5-8) times larger than our solar system.
For more information take a look at:
Hope this helps,
Mike Arida
for Ask a High-Energy Astronomer ...
PROPLYD - Contrived acronym for protoplanetary disk. Proplyds are found around low mass young stars close to massive OB stars, whose radiation photoevaporates the outer layer regions of their gas-dust envelopes, ...
PROPLYDS
Proplyds (short for ) are disks of dust and gas in space that surround newborn stars. They appear as fuzzy blobs, even when seen through the Hubble Space Telescope.
A proplyd forming in the Orion Nebula.
The protoplanetary disk HH-30 in Taurus, about 450 light years away. The disk emits the reddish stellar jet, a common structure of these formations.
Some of the Orion proplyds are visible as silhouettes against a background of hot, bright interstellar gas, while others are seen to shine brightly.
From studying the number of proplyds (protoplanetary discs, clumps of gas in nebulae from which stars and solar systems are formed) then the number of stars in the galaxy should be several orders of magnitude higher than what we know about.
Take a peak at Figure 7 for a view of some of these wanna-be stars (which we call proplyds), ...
Details of the images show several protoplanetary disks ( proplyds ), including a single dark disk surrounding a central star (Ref). The lower left inset figure shows a drawing giving the approximate scale of our Solar System relative to the proplyd.
What HST did find were disks of matter around stars seen in silhouette against the Orion Nebula (called 'proplyds', for 'proto-planetary disks' (right).
About half of the young suns in Orion show evidence for disks, likely sites for current planet formation, including four lying at the center of proplyds (proto-planetary disks) imaged by Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed hundreds of protoplanetary disks (proplyds) in the Orion Nebula.
 See also: Solar, Nebula, Planet, Time, Temperature
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