# @nasa on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CcV2Ck3O6ph
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/11732935-nasa-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/fba3778f80.jpg
- **Posted:** 2022-04-14T18:20:50.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** NASA (@NASA) — https://gondola.cc/NASA

## Caption

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 processes also disperse the gas and dust, breaking up dense clumps and reducing or halting further new star formation. In fact, the material that forms this nebula’s wings was ejected from a dense cluster of stars that lies between them. 
 
Another cluster of stars, named Serpens South, can be seen to the upper right of the butterfly in this image. Although both Serpens South and the cluster at the heart of the pictured nebula are young in astronomical terms (less than a few million years old), Serpens South is the younger of the two. Its stars are still embedded within their cloud but will someday break out to produce bubbles like those captured in this image. 

#AstroPhotography #Space #Nebula #Cosmos #Stars #Butterfly #ABugsLife #Spitzer #SpitzerTelescope #Galaxy #metamorphosis #NASA

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
- **Likes:** 891,560
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 2,050

## Tags

stars, spitzertelescope, butterfly, metamorphosis, cosmos, nasa, astrophotography, space, spitzer, nebula, abugslife, galaxy

---
Copyright (c) Gondola