In 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope photographed the beautiful Beetle Nebula (NGC 6302). This planetary nebula is located 4,000 light-years from Earth.

A dying star — once five times more massive than the Sun — created this cosmic show of light. The star shed its outer layers at a speed of more than 950,000 kilometers per hour. This warm gas flowed away from the star’s poles, creating a bilobed structure. These two lobes resemble the wings of a butterfly or an hourglass. Our sun will die in five billion years and will shed its outer layers of gas. This results in a planetary nebula.

The mystery of this bipolar nebula

Remarkably, the Beetle Nebula is a bipolar planetary nebula. Most planetary nebulae with one central star are round, such as the Ring Nebula and Helix Nebula. Bipolar planetary nebulae are usually caused by two or more stars, but no second star has been found in the Beetle Nebula to date.

Over the past decades, several NASA space missions have captured beautiful images of nebulae, galaxies, stellar nurseries and planets. Every Saturday afternoon we retrieve a beautiful space photo from the archive. This is the first article in the series, but you will soon be able to find all the photos on this page.

One of the hottest stars

Fun fact: The star at the heart of the Beetle Nebula is one of the hottest stars in our galaxy. The object has a surface temperature of more than 220,000 degrees Celsius. This makes the star 35 times hotter than our sun. The star will cool down slowly from now on.

Star is playing hide and seek

The dying star is not seen in the photo. “The star is so hard to find because it is hidden behind a cloud of dust and ice in the center of the nebula,” explains Professor Albert Zijlstra of the University of Manchester. The star is exactly in the middle between the two lobes.

Download this beautiful space photo

Want to download this spectacular high-resolution space photo? click here to get a closer look at the Beetle Nebula.