Hubble, NASA (July 27, 2009)
"What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour -- fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes!
"A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. This object is an example of a planetary nebula, so-named because many of them have a round appearance resembling that of a planet when viewed through a small telescope. ...
"...NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star’s outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The "butterfly" stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri...."
There's a 'full size' (2963 x 3538 pixels) version available at "Images from Refurbished Hubble," along with other other eye-poppers, like Stephan's Quintet and the Carina Nebula: and a graphic of Eta Carina's spectrum. Each photo has several paragraphs of descriptive text.
These are visually-impressive photos. More to the point, the relatively high-definition, high color depth images Hubble is getting allow astronomers to see how closely their models of how stars work match reality - and learn more about what makes the universe tick.
Or, in this case, whoosh.
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