Butterfly emerges
11.stellar demise
from
in planetary nebula
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 nearly 20 000 degrees Celsius. The gas is tearing
across space at more than 950 000 kilometres per 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 centre 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 the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image
of the planetary nebula, catalogued as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebu