lies a host of bizarre, teardrop-shaped objects. They look like strange comets, but are in fact evaporating, planet-forming disks around young stars. Astronomers are perplexed by the existence of these disks, because they should have been destroyed long ago.
In MUSE's image of 177-341 W, the bright arc, or cusp, around the top of the proplyd is where the powerful torrent of ultraviolet radiation from theta-1 Ori C is slamming into the gentler stellar wind flowing from the star at the heart of 177-341 W. This interaction is creating a shockwave. A total of 178 proplyds have been discovered so far in the Orion Nebula. That's potentially indicative of the births of 178 planetary systems beyond those that have already formed there. We say"potentially" because there is one big caveat: the Proplyd Lifetime Problem.As ultraviolet radiation drags material out of the disks that would otherwise go into forming planets, the disks lose mass.