Start the week off with a beautiful new Hubble image of a 'butterfly' nebula

Sometimes space is so lovely it puts sci-fi CGI to shame. Late last week, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) released a new photo of the Twin Jets Nebula, or PN M2-9, a "cosmic butterfly" comprised of two stars about the size of the Sun that orbit each other. The bipolar nebula was discovered in 1947 by astronomer Rudolph Minkowski (thus the M in the name), and photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997. But this new image, captured by Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), is much more detailed, and more stunning:

You can read more about the Twin Jet Nebula, and how the dying stars are producing the shimmering wings of gas, at NASA. Or you can get much of the same information from the Wall Street Journal video below. Peter Weber

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