A cosmic butterfly ... images from a telescope in Chile. The celestial view, captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, is actually the result of dust spit out of a ...

New time-lapse images of the beautiful Butterfly Nebula come closer to explaining ... Hidden at the point where the two wings meet, a once-mighty star now smolders as a tiny, collapsed white ...

So named for its resemblance to the winged insect, the "butterfly" is actually a planetary nebula -- a giant cloud of gas that forms around an ancient star that hasn't yet exploded. The European ...

New time-lapse images ... star has been crawling outward at just one-tenth that speed, resulting in complex and asymmetrical structures forming throughout the nebula's wings. "The Butterfly ...