A beautiful space butterfly! 🦋 What looks like a cosmic red butterfly at first glance is in reality a nursery for hundreds of baby stars, revealed in this infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. This space butterfly is a nebula—a giant cloud of gas and dust in space where new stars may form. The butterfly's two "wings" are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from the hottest, most massive stars in this region. Besides being beautiful, this nebula demonstrates how the formation of stars results in the destruction of the very clouds that helped create them. Inside giant clouds of gas and dust in space, the force of gravity pulls material together into dense clumps. Sometimes these clumps reach a critical density that allows stars to form at their cores. Radiation and winds coming from the most massive stars in those clouds—combined with the material spewed into space when those stars eventually explode—sometimes form bubbles like those pictured here. But these...