Chosen by: Jason Kalirai, project scientist, James Webb Space Telescope, Space Telescope Science Institute “The Butterfly Nebula shows what happens to a star at the end of its life, when it ...

The Hubble Space Telescope's view of the Butterfly Nebula. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Kastner (RIT)) Those nebulas are known formally as NGC 6303 and NGC 7027.

NASA even made the Butterfly Nebula one of the first objects observed by Hubble. The wings are about three light-years across, and the nebula sits 3,500 light-years away from Earth.

To get to the bottom of the weirdness, Balick and his colleagues compared Hubble Space Telescope images of the Butterfly Nebula from 2009 with more recent images captured in 2020.

A color rendition of NGC 6302, the Butterfly Nebula, created from black-and-white exposures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2019 and 2020.

The nebula is a beautiful sight, though one that you can’t help but see in our future in some way. That’s because our star, the Sun, is expected to end in a similar fate as the Butterfly ...

Something is amiss in the Butterfly Nebula. When a team led by astronomers at the University of Washington compared two exposures of this planetary nebula that had been taken by the Hubble Space ...

Butterfly emerges from stellar demise in planetary nebula: The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a new camera aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image of the planetary nebula ...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured an image of the Butterfly Nebula, also known as Westerhout 40 (W40), as part of the Massive Young Stellar Clusters Study in Infrared and X-rays (MYStIX ...

'Hubble Telescope' Pic of 'Serenity Nebula' Is Truly Unreal Those clouds of dust and gas in space known as nebulae make for a beautiful sight. Nur Ibrahim Published Sept. 9, 2023. Image ...