On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:13:50 -0400, BAR wrote:

Tom Francis - SWSports wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/m4xz56

Has anyone offered an idea as to the cause of this structure yet?

Yep - it's an exploded star.

"NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years
away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star’s
outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The "butterfly"
stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the
distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri."

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hu...ero/index.html