In space, construction is just as messy as it is here on Earth. As planets form and huge chunks of debris are left behind, those debris are bound to crash into one another, creating all kinds of dust. That’s exactly what the Hubble Space Telescope captured in a series of spectacular images using the largest and most sensitive visible-light imaging survey ever performed on these debris fields.

“It’s like looking back in time to see the kinds of destructive events that once routinely happened in our solar system after the planets formed,” said survey leader Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona.

The dusty disks formed around stars, and no two are exactly alike. Some formed around stars as young as 10 million years old, while some were over one billion years old. Though originally believed to be as disk-like as they appear, the latest survey reveals they’re actually three-dimensional objects. This deformation is either due to the star’s movement through space, or gravitation interference by unseen planets.

“We find that the systems are not simply flat with uniform surfaces,” Schneider said. “These are actually pretty complicated three-dimensional debris systems, often with embedded smaller structures. Some of the substructures could be signposts of unseen planets.”

The survey reveals an incredible level of diversity. As the disks show, there are many systems out there wherein the planets orbit their host star in a way very different from what we observe in our own solar system. The planets appear to have an influence on the dust disks, just as the disks appear to influenced the planets.

“We are now seeing a similar diversity in the architecture of accompanying debris systems,” Schneider said. “How are the planets affecting the disks, and how are the disks affecting the planets? There is some sort of interdependence between a planet and the accompanying debris that might affect the evolution of these exoplanetary debris systems.”