Science News

Cosmic Butterfly: Hubble Telescope Captures The Twin Jet Nebula

In a spectacular image captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, two stars are living out the last of their lives; as they die, a butterfly shape of incredible beauty is created.

The primary star in this photo is a red giant, between 1.0 and 1.4 times the mass of our sun. Its outer gaseous envelope is blowing away, exposing its stellar core. Eventually, it will morph into a white dwarf.

The other star is already a white dwarf – a slowly cooling dead star — between 0.6 and 1.0 times the mass of the sun.

As Discovery News reports, the white dwarf is orbiting very close to the other star and “may have even been engulfed by the other’s expanding stellar atmosphere,” which would result in the nebula. “. . . astronomers think the gravity of one star is pulling ejected material from its binary companion.”

The white dwarf is orbiting very close to the primary star and may even have been engulfed by the other’s expanding stellar atmosphere with the resulting interaction creating the nebula.

The pair orbit each other every 100 years, and astronomers think the gravity of one star is pulling ejected material from its binary companion and twisting it into two thin iridescent lobes which are stretching far out into space.

The cosmic butterfly is often referred to as the Twin Jet Nebula, but also goes by a more scientific moniker: PN M2-9.

The PN refers to the fact that the Twin Jet Nebula is a planetary nebula, and the M is in reference to Rudolph Minkowski, a German-American astronomer who first discovered the nebula in 1947.

Despite being called a planetary nebula, that are no planets involved here. When nebula were first discovered in the 1780s, astronomers named them planetary nebulas because they appeared to be planets through the telescopes used in that period.

Last month, The Hubble Telescope caught spectacular footage of the Lagoon Nebula’s dying moments.

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