NGC6302 - The Butterfly Nebula

NGC 6302, also known as the Butterfly Nebula is one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. It is located about 4,000 light-years away, towards the Scorpius constellation (the Scorpion). What resemble dainty wings are actually roiling regions of gas heated to more than 20.000 degrees Celsius. The gas is tearing across space at almost one million kilometers an hour — fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes.

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.

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.

The central star itself cannot be seen, because it is hidden within a doughnut-shaped ring of dust, or torus, which appears as a dark band pinching the nebula in the center.

The star's surface temperature is estimated to be about 230,000 degrees Celsius, making it one of the hottest known stars in our galaxy.