Wondrous

As spring arrives in the Northern Hemisphere, so too come butterflies. In July 2009, Hubble caught this celestial butterfly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. Known to astronomers as NGC 6302, it is a planetary nebula, made of gas and dust expelled by a dying Sun-like star.

This celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly. But it is far from serene.

 What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes!

A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. This object is an example of a planetary nebula, so-named because many of them have a round appearance resembling that of a planet when viewed through a small telescope.

 The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope snapped this image of the planetary nebula, cataloged as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula. WFC3 was installed by NASA astronauts in May 2009, during the servicing mission to upgrade and repair the 19-year-old Hubble telescope.

NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star's outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The "butterfly" stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.