Avi Blizovsky
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The Hubble Space Telescope photographed the "Butterfly Wing Nebula" - the nebula NGC 2346. The nebula is about two thousand light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros (near the Little Dog and the Big Dog).
This image shows the last gasp of a binary star system located at the center of the nebula. At the center of this nebula is a pair of stars that were so close together that they orbited each other every 16 days. It is so close that even with Hubble it would not be possible to see the two stars separately. Astronomers believe that one of the stars, when it exploded and became a red giant, actually swallowed its companion in a kind of stellar cannibalism.
The result of this ingestion led to a mutual swirling of the two stars that culminated in the eruption of the outer layer of the red giant. Most of the outer layers have been thrown into a compressed disk, which can still be seen in Hubble's image orbiting the central star.
For information on the NASA website
Yadan Astrophysics 2 - Stars in their lives and deaths
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~111819412~~~97&SiteName=hayadan
