Star attraction results in interstellar butterfly

This photograph provides an image of a bipolar or "butterfly" nebula, M2-9, 2,100 light years away and it was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. A nebula is a cloud of interstellar dust and gases. There are twin orbiting stars at the heart of this nebula, one of them thought to be dying. Astronomers suspect that the gravity of one star pulls weakly bound gas from the surface of the other and flings it into a thin, dense disc which surrounds both stars, giving them this remarkable halo.