NGC 6302 — the Bug Nebula or Butterfly Nebula — spreads its two vast lobes across this Hubble view in incandescent pink, orange and white. The apparent delicacy is deceptive: these wing-like forms are streams of gas expelled by a dying star, heated to nearly 20,000 degrees Celsius and travelling at more than 950,000 kilometres per hour. Roughly 4,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, the nebula extends for more than two light-years.

At its centre, a narrow dark band pinches the luminous structure into a bipolar, hourglass form. This is a thick, doughnut-shaped ring of dust surrounding the central star, constraining its outflow and directing faster material into the elongated lobes. The star itself remains hidden within the ring. Once about five times the mass of the Sun, it has shed its outer layers over approximately 2,200 years and now floods the expelled gas with ultraviolet radiation, making it glow.

The image holds several distinct kinds of detail at once. Diffuse outer clouds dissolve into the black field, while nearer the centre the gas gathers into sharply illuminated folds, narrow filaments and finger-like projections. Warm reddish margins surround cooler-looking blue and green passages, and crisp white fronts trace places where fast-moving gas has overtaken material expelled earlier.

A closer look

The upper-left lobe is comparatively open and diaphanous. Fine strands curl through its faint glow, with brighter pink and white material emerging from softer blue-green haze. Along the lower-left region, several slender projections point back towards the concealed star. Astronomers think such finger-like forms may mark denser blobs of material that have resisted the pressure of the stellar wind.

Across the opposite lobe, the structure becomes more contorted. Twisting ridges and abrupt outlines run towards the lower right, while a bright edge presses against a neighbouring dark region. Particularly striking is the white formation at upper right, whose clean boundary records a shock wave: faster gas colliding with slower material that had already left the star. Throughout the nebula, the white areas correspond to emission from sulphur, while much of the red along the outer edges comes from nitrogen and marks the coolest gas visible in the image.

The central darkness gives the whole formation its visual tension. Light appears to burst away on either side, yet the source remains unseen. Beyond the brightest gas, faint wisps taper towards the margins and small, sharp points of light punctuate the deep background, emphasising the extraordinary breadth of the two-lobed structure.

How this image was made

Hubble observed NGC 6302 on 27 July 2009 using Wide Field Camera 3, which had been installed by NASA astronauts only two months earlier during Servicing Mission 4. The camera recorded ultraviolet and visible light through filters isolating emissions from oxygen, helium, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur. These observations were combined to create the finished composite, allowing differences in the nebula’s temperature, density and composition to become legible through colour and structure.

The observation also reveals successive episodes in the star’s decline. Relatively slow-moving material first accumulated around its equator to form the obscuring dust ring. Faster gas escaped perpendicular to that ring, producing the extended wings. A later stellar wind — a stream of charged particles moving at more than 3.2 million kilometres per hour — then drove through the existing lobes, reshaping them into the intricate cavities, projections and shock-brightened edges visible here.

Image details and provenance

• Subject: NGC 6302, the Bug Nebula or Butterfly Nebula
• Object type: Planetary nebula in the Milky Way
• Constellation: Scorpius
• Distance from Earth: Approximately 4,000 light-years
• Physical scale: The butterfly-shaped nebula extends for more than two light-years
• Telescope: Hubble Space Telescope
• Instrument: Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3)
• Observation date: 27 July 2009
• Wavelengths and filters: Ultraviolet and visible-light observations using filters isolating emission from oxygen, helium, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur
• Image construction: Composite image created from filtered Hubble observations
• Programme: Hubble Servicing Mission 4 Early Release Observations
• Original release date: 9 September 2009, 17:00
• Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

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