Circumstellar disc

Common card · No. 452505

A circumstellar disc (or circumstellar disk) is a torus-, pancake- or ring-shaped accretion disk of matter composed of gas, dust, planetesimals, asteroids, or collision fragments in orbit around a star. Around the youngest stars, they are the reservoirs of material out of which planets may form. Around mature stars, they indicate that planetesimal formation has taken place, and around white dwarfs, they indicate that planetary material survived the whole of stellar evolution. Such a disc can manifest itself in various ways.

Read on Wikipedia · Image NASA, ESA, and R. Soummer (STScI), CC BY 4.0