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Butterfly Nebula

Butterfly Nebula

This nebula, which is two light-years wide, used to be a star five times the size of the sun. Now it is a streaming cauldron of superheated gas racing into space at 270 kilometers per second. The white dwarf at the center is hidden by a doughnut-shaped ring of dust that shows as a dark stripe at the center. Each color represents a different gas.


Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble SM4 ERO Team
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