This newly released image from the Gemini South Telescope captures the familiar planet Nebula – a giant dead star at the end of its life. These celestial displays often take on a circular or global shape, but NGC 6302, as it is officially known, has a similar appeal to a butterfly. And what a beautiful butterfly.
I stick to one of the amateur stars, and planetary nebulas are among my favorite gems. These things have nothing to do with the planets; The first astronomers called them that, because, observed through small telescopes, they resemble distant gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter. M57, also known as the Ring Nebula, is a case in point, as you can see from my image of the object below. The name “planetary nebula” -Fritsheni -Bustricly-Bheck, however, in fact, are glowing shells of fuel emitted by dying stars.
Planetary nebulas sometimes take the shape of an hourglass, or even a dumbbell, as the outer layers of a dying star are ejected from space. The bright colors that we see in those nembulae usually come from different gases that glow under strong ultraviolet rays, oxydgen shines blue, nitrogen is red, and nitrogen is red, and nitrogen appears in shades of red or deep violet.
And in the case of NGC 6302 – the butterfly nebula – the object takes a butterfly-like form. Astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope have seen it in 2020 (shown below), but a new image, captured by the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, offers a different perspective.
As the Noirlab release reveals, the Butterfly Nebula, between 25,500 and 3,800 years away, was formed from the death of a sun-like star. Before collapsing into a white hole, the star expanded into a red dwarf about 1,000 times the mass of our Sun. As its outer layers entered the atmosphere about 2,000 years ago, the slow-moving gas moved outwards, forming a large, dark ring. At the same time, perpemicular transmission in this band was included in what we now see as the lobes of the onet wing.
The fast Stellar Winds then tear through this former gas, hitting it at speeds of up to 1.86 million miles per hour (3 million kilometers per hour). It is this process that creates the spectacular craters and pillars seen in the butterfly nebula. Intense radiation from County White Dwarf is now heating the surrounding hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen to 20,000 degrees Celsius, resulting in those bright colors.
The International Gemini Observatory marks the telescope’s 25th anniversary. Students in Chile chose this particular image through the Gemini First Adaptation Image Contest, part of the Noirlab Legacy Imaging program. This project is dedicated to producing a scientific grade color image from the 8.1-Meter Telescope on Cerro Pachón.
