The Bug Nebula, NGC 6302, is one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. At its centre lies a superhot, dying star smothered in a blanket of hailstones. Most planetary nebulae are distinctive, but few are as extreme as this one. The  dying star at its centre is shrouded by a blanket of icy hailstones and until now was never directly imaged.

Recently a team of astronomers at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, using the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope have just released another image from the new Wide-Field Camera 3, installed on the Hubble earlier this year. This time they have managed to capture the previously unseen star at the centre of the Bug Nebula (NGC 6302).  

StarImaged at the centre of the Planetery Bug Nebula Credit: Nasa Hubble

Previous attempts have failed due to the brightness and dust of the Nebula. This star, one of the hottest in the galaxy, has a temperature of about 200,000 Kelvin – 33 times hotter than the Sun. The star is about 3500 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. It is the hot temperature of the star (possibly as high as  400,000 K) that ionizes the nebula  gas. The gas is the remenants of the  stars corona, blown off  during the later stages of its life. The star has gone through its red giant phase and is now a late-stage white dwarf.

Credit: ESA/NASA and Albert Zijlstra