Chaotic Butterfly

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

Chaos reigns in the cen­ter of this butterfly-shaped neb­ula in the con­stel­la­tion Pup­pis. NGC 2440 is a plan­e­tary neb­ula and is the remains of a star like our Sun. The com­plex struc­ture within the cen­ter of this neb­ula sug­gest to astronomers that the star has ejected mate­r­ial peri­od­i­cally in var­i­ous directions.

Explore the plan­e­tary neb­ula in this NASA Hub­ble Space Tele­scope image. NGC 2440 is also rich in clouds of dust. Travel along the long, dark streaks point­ing away from the cen­tral star. Ultra­vi­o­let light from the burned-out star, called a white dwarf, causes the gas around the star to glow. Find the white dot in the cen­ter of the neb­ula. This white dwarf is one of the hottest known to astronomers with a tem­per­a­ture of more than 200,000 degrees Centi­grade. The cen­tral star cast off its outer lay­ers as it came to the point where it could no longer keep up nuclear fusion in its core. Nuclear fusion is what pow­ers a star, giv­ing out light, heat and other radiÂaÂtion.

The dying star cre­ated a cocoon of gas and dust around itself. Even­tu­ally our Sun will burn out and cre­ate a neb­ula like this one; but not for another 5 bil­lion years. Some plan­e­tary neb­ula have uni­form rings around the star.

Plan­e­tary neb­ula have noth­ing to do with plan­ets. In the 18th and 19th cen­tury, astronomers came across neb­ula that resem­bled the disks of dis­tant plan­ets. At that time, astronomers didn’t know that the neb­ula were the remains of dead or dying stars. Even­tu­ally, astronomers found that the Milky Way is lit­tered with these starry remains.

NGC 2440 lies about 4,000 light-years away toward the con­stel­la­tion Pup­pis. Pup­pis is a con­stel­la­tion in the south­ern sky and is Latin for the poop deck of a ship. The con­stel­la­tion was orig­i­nally part of the larger con­stel­la­tion Argo Navis, named after the ship of the myth­i­cal Jason and the Argonauts.