The beautiful Butterfly Nebula, located in the constellation Scorpius, just 4000 light years away from Earth which is quite close to Earth in cosmic measurements.
The ‘wings’ of the butterfly nebula are a giant cloud of dust and gas being thrown into space, which happens when when a dying star explodes. The wingspan is 3 light years wide, or 27 000 000 000 000 kilometers.
The original star is estimated to have been about five times the mass of our sun, which is too small for for it to become a supernova, so it will eventually become a dense white dwarf star about the size of Earth but with the mass of our sun.
The photograph above was taken with the Hubble telescope in 2009.
