astralavista

The Orion Nebula, a dazzling cloud of stellar dust riddled with bullet holes of bright young stars some 1,500 light years away, may be the most rewarding sight for any a backyard astronomer. Yet beyond the beauty, there lays a secret. It turns out that nebula holds important clues about the formation of our solar system.
NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory just snapped pictures of 1,400 stars in the nebula, including 30 which resemble the early sun. The photos revealed that some of Orion's youngest stars, just 10 million years old, erupt regularly in huge stellar flares, which dwarf in size, frequency and energy any such electromagnetic burps expelled by our Sun.
But that may not have always been the case. NASA astronomers analyzing the pictures say that the Sun may have also pumped out powerful flares when it was still young and boisterous, some 4.6 billion years ago. If that's the case, such outbursts have probably shaped planetary distribution of our solar system. "Big X-ray flares could lead to planetary systems like ours, where Earth is a safe distance from the sun," said Eric Feigelson of Penn State University. "Stars with smaller flares, on the other hand, might end up with Earth-like planets plummeting into the star."
Feigelson and his colleagues said that violent X-ray flares can create turbulence when they strike planet-forming disk, blow away nascent planets like soap bubbles, and prevent planets from burning up inside young stars. "Although these flares may be creating havoc in the disks, they ultimately could do more good than harm," said Feigelson. "These flares may be acting like a planetary protection program."
NASA wrote in a press release that "about half of the young suns in Orion show evidence of planet-forming disks including four lying at the center of proplyds (proto-planetary disks) imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope."