Casting its visual net far into the universe, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured new images of a cosmic "butterfly," a shimmering object known as the Twin Jet Nebula.
Also known by the less poetic name of PN M2-9, the object is a planetary nebula, usually a ring-shaped nebula created by an expanding shell of gas surrounding a star near the end of its life.
However, while ordinary planetary nebulae have one star at their center, the visually-distinctive Twin Jet Nebula is a bipolar nebula with a binary star system at its core, scientists explain.
The larger star in the stellar pair is nearing the end of its life, ejecting its outer layers into space as a gas cloud; its partner is even older and is a small white dwarf, they say.
Both were originally around the mass of our sun, observations have determined.
The motion of the two stars around each other — once every century — is likely the cause of the unique butterfly shape, stretching the dying star's ejected gas into two "wings" instead of the more common ring or sphere, they suggest.
The twin lobes of gas, streaming out at speeds greater than a million kilometers per hour (621,400 mph) are given their iridescent colors by exposure to the remnant core of the expiring star, according to the European Space Agency's Hubble website.
The outermost shell of expanding gases is believed to be around 1,200 years old.
The M in the object's catalog name — PN M2-9 — honors German-American astronomer Rudolph Minkowske, who discovered the winged nebula in 1947.
It sits around 2,100 light-years from Earth.
Hubble had gathered images of the nebula in 1997 using its Wide Field Planetary Camera; the new images were created during observations using the space telescope's Imaging Spectograph, NASA says.
