This is the stunning multi-ringed disk around the Herbig star HD97048 that I published back in 2016 (click) and which was featured in an ESO press release (click). The images were taken with the SPHERE extreme adaptive optics instrument. In the above images you see two different methods of cancelling out the bright central star so we can make the faint scattered light coming from the circumstellar disk visible. On the left we use the fact that scattered light is polarized, while stellar light is not, while on the right we use apparent field rotation of the disk around the star during the course of the night.

The gaps in the disk, which are located at several hundreds of astronomical units, are likely caused by forming planets, one of which was recently indirectly detected in a study lead by Christoph Pinte and with myself as CO-author, using the ALMA observatory (click). The planets causing these gaps have likely roughly the mass of Jupiter. To directly observe them we may have to wait until the ESO Extremely Large Telescope comes online.