NASA clicks photo of a 'space butterfly'

NASA keeps sending brilliant pictures our way. These range from those of distant galaxies to our own backyard in the solar system, and everything in between. Sometimes these pics resemble 'Hand of God' or anything our perception allows us to see. This time, NASA has clicked a space butterfly!

This cosmic butterfly has been captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. It is a nebula. Nebulas are huge masses of gas and space dust in which new stars form. The infrared image of this 'space butterfly' shows two 'wings'.

In its Instagram post, NASA explains that these 'wings' are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from the hottest, most massive stars that are in the process of getting formed.

"...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..." says NASA in the Instagram post.

The beautiful image was posted on April 15 and within a day, it has garnered more than 700,000 likes.

"I wanna get lost in that Space Butterfly, can I please?" comments a user.