NASA's Hubble space telescope captures 'cosmic' butterfly shining through its iridescent wings

NASA's Hubble space telescope recently captured a breathtaking phenomenon of stardust taking a form of a shape on Earth, this time, a butterfly nebula. The “cosmic” butterfly, also known as the Twin Jet Nebula, glowed with vibrant colour and expanding gas as the old star took the final gasp of life.

The mechanism which leads to the phenomenon of Twin Jet Nebula is still one of the greatest mysteries in the field of modern astrophysics. According to NASA, the phenomenon takes place when a large amount of dust surrounds a slowly dying star. The dying star is also accompanied by another smaller star, and the duo gives the appearance of two wings of a colorful shining butterfly.

In the cosmic butterfly captured recently by the Hubble space telescope, a small white dwarf star accompanied the bigger, dying star to give it a butterfly-like shining appearance. Under such a system, two wings appear to emerge from the two stars located in the centre.

According to NASA, the two-winged shape of the Twin Jet Nebula is caused by the motion of the two stars in the system around each other. The researchers believe that during the formation of the cosmic butterfly, the dying star and the dwarf star orbit around their common center of mass. The two-lobe formation takes place when the gas ejected from the dying star gets pulled, instead of expanding in the form of a sphere.

"Astronomers have found that the two stars in this pair each have around the same mass as the sun, ranging from 0.6 to 1.0 solar masses for the smaller star, and from 1.0 to 1.4 solar masses for its larger companion," stated a NASA press release.

The last image of a Twin Jet Nebula was released by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in 1997. The version recently released incorporates more detailed observations gathered by the telescope’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph.

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