This image, which combines infrared data from the James Webb Space Telescope with submillimetre observations from the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), shows the doughnut-shaped torus and interconnected bubbles of dusty gas that surround the Butterfly Nebula’s central star. The torus is oriented vertically and nearly edge-on from our perspective, and it intersects with bubbles of gas enclosing the star. The bubbles appear bright red in this image, illuminated by the light from helium and neon gas. Outside the bubbles, jets traced by emission from ionised iron shoot off in opposite directions.
ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Matsuura, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), N. Hirano, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb) (CC BY 4.0).
An optical image view of the Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302, captured by the Hubble space telescope.
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, K. Noll, J. Kastner, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb).
There’s a double whammy for creationists in this new paper. Not only does it expose the Bible’s description of the Universe as laughably naïve, but it also shows how organic molecules — in the form of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — that may have formed the basis of life on the prebiotic Earth, could have been created in deep space and later incorporated into our planet either at its formation or via impacts from space debris.
The paper, by a team of scientists led by Cardiff University, has just been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the researchers reveal how stars generate space dust, organic material, and the fundamental building blocks from which rocky planets like Earth are formed. Their study focuses on the Butterfly Nebula (NGC 6302), a spectacular stellar remnant.
What Are PAHs?
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are complex organic molecules made of fused benzene rings — essentially arrangements of carbon and hydrogen in hexagonal patterns. On Earth, they are often associated with combustion (for example, in car exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke, or charred food). In space, however, they form naturally in the outflows of dying stars and in the dense molecular clouds that give rise to new stars and planetary systems.
PAHs are of great interest to astrobiologists because they are thought to be among the earliest organic compounds to have existed in the Universe. They can undergo chemical transformations to form more complex molecules, including amino acids and nucleotides, which are the essential components of life. Their presence in meteorites and interstellar dust suggests that the seeds of life were widespread long before Earth even formed.
The Role of JWST
The James Webb Space Telescope has revolutionised our ability to study such molecules in deep space. Its infrared instruments are capable of detecting the faint spectral signatures of PAHs, even in regions crowded with gas and dust. In the case of the Butterfly Nebula, JWST’s unprecedented resolution allowed the Cardiff-led team to see in detail how dying stars manufacture dust grains and complex carbon-based compounds, ejecting them into space to become part of the raw material for future stars and planets.
This means that the chemical precursors of life are not rare Earth-bound accidents, but natural products of stellar evolution on a cosmic scale. Every planetary system forming around a new star is seeded with these same fundamental molecules.
For science, this strengthens the case that life may not be unique to Earth. If the raw ingredients are being mass-produced throughout the galaxy, then the emergence of life is more a question of probability and time than of divine intervention.
For creationists, however, it presents another insurmountable problem. The biblical authors, living in the ancient Near East, imagined the Universe as a small, human-centred construction: a flat Earth covered by a solid dome, with stars fixed in place like tiny lights. They could never have imagined the reality that modern astronomy reveals: a Universe of trillions of stars, with nebulae forging the organic compounds that become the building blocks of life itself.
The Butterfly Nebula (NGC 6302).The JWST images and data show not only how wrong the biblical cosmology was, but also how redundant the idea of a creator becomes when natural processes can explain the origins of both planets and the molecules that make life possible.
- Type: Bipolar planetary nebula
- Constellation: Scorpius
- Distance from Earth: ~3,400 light-years
- Size: Around 3 light-years across (roughly 30 trillion km)
- Age: Estimated a few thousand years since the central star shed its outer layers
- Central Star: An extremely hot white dwarf, with a surface temperature over 200,000 °C — one of the hottest known stellar remnants.
- Appearance: Named the Butterfly Nebula due to its striking symmetrical lobes, which look like a butterfly’s wings. The structure was created when the dying star expelled its outer gases in opposite directions, sculpted by stellar winds and magnetic fields.
- Significance:
- Shows the final stages of stellar evolution for a Sun-like star.
- Rich in dust and complex molecules, making it a natural laboratory for studying how stars recycle material into space.
- JWST observations reveal how cosmic dust and organic molecules (such as PAHs) form and are distributed in such environments.
The nebula is a dramatic example of how stars enrich the galaxy with the raw materials that later form new stars, planets, and potentially life itself.
The Cardiff University team’s findings are outlined in their news release, accompanied by breathtaking images of the Butterfly Nebula. They stand as a vivid reminder that science continues to expand our understanding of the cosmos, while creationism clings to myths written by people who believed the sky was just a ceiling.
Scientists have uncovered the clearest evidence yet of how cosmic dust is formed in space.
The process, which lays the foundations for rocky planets and contains ingredients linked to the origins of life, was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Thought to be similar to rocks and sand on Earth, cosmic dust is made up of microscopic particles of minerals and organic material.
Much of this material has a randomly oriented-atomic structure like soot, but some of it forms beautiful, crystalline shapes like tiny gemstones.
For years, scientists have debated how this dust forms in space.
Now, a team of scientists led by Cardiff University, has confirmed these crystals form in a thick disk or torus of gas and dust that surrounds dying stars.
Their findings, presented in the journal Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society, reveal how stars give rise to space dust, organic material, and the building blocks that rocky planets like Earth are made of.
The observations show crystalline dust, mostly in the torus, but also some blowing away in the strong outflowing jets of gas. This tells us the crystals likely formed in the torus, which is a dense, stable environment that formed from the ejected material from the star several thousand years ago. From this we can learn about stars in their current state and when they die.
Dr Mikako Matsuura, lead author.
Cardiff Hub for Astrophysics Research and Technology (CHART)
School of Physics and Astronomy
Cardiff University, Cardiff UK.
The observations are of NGC 6302, a planetary nebula created by a dying star located in the Scorpius constellation, approximately 3,500 light years from Earth.
Previously captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 6302 is known as the Butterfly Nebula because of its two lobes that spread in opposite directions forming ‘wings’ and a ‘body’ of gas and dust which appears as a dark band at its centre.
JWST zoomed in on this dusty core of the Butterfly Nebula, providing the team of astronomers with an unprecedented view of its complex structure.
The Butterfly Nebula is an incredibly complex object that still holds many mysteries, but JWST allows us to see things that even Hubble could not detect. The dust formation revealed by these amazing new JWST observations provides clues as to how rocky planets like Earth may have formed around young stars. These findings are helping to reveal the lifecycles of planets, stars and dust within the cosmos.
Dr Roger Wesson, co-author.
Cardiff Hub for Astrophysics Research and Technology (CHART)
School of Physics and Astronomy
Cardiff University, Cardiff UK.
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)—complex carbon-based compounds also found in crude oil on Earth—were detected on the surface of the torus, where ultraviolet light from the star heats up the gas and dust.
PAHs were also seen at the edges of gas bubbles formed by bursts from the star.
Unlike the crystalline silicates that form in calm conditions, PAHs seem to show up in more energetic, chaotic areas. We were surprised at just how dynamic the nebula is. The typical assumption is that planetary nebulae exist in a state of inactivity, a sort of resting phase for material which was ejected before the star became this shiny butterfly-like nebula. Instead, we see what resemble both cool gemstones formed in calm, long-lasting zones and fiery grime created in violent, fast-moving parts of space, all within a single object.
Dr Mikako Matsuura.
The latest observations use data from JWST’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) working in integral field unit mode.
This mode combines a camera and a spectrograph to take images at many different wavelengths simultaneously, revealing how crystalline and organic dust appear in different wavelengths and locations.
Publication:
ABSTRACTThe message from studies like this could not be clearer: life’s building blocks are not the miraculous creations of a divine craftsman, but the natural by-products of stars living and dying across the cosmos. The very molecules that underpin biology arise from physics and chemistry operating on a grand scale, not from supernatural intervention.
NGC 6302 is a spectacular bipolar planetary nebula (PN) whose spectrum exhibits fast outflows and highly ionized emission lines, indicating the presence of a very hot central star (~220 000 K). Its infrared spectrum reveals a mixed oxygen and carbon dust chemistry, displaying both silicate and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) features. Using the James Webb Space Telescope Mid-Infrared Instrument and Medium Resolution Spectrometer, a mosaic map was obtained over the core of NGC 6302, covering the wavelength range of 5–28 μm and spanning an area of ~18.5 arcsec x 15arcsec. The spatially resolved spectrum reveals ~200 molecular and ionized lines from species requiring ionization potentials of up to 205 eV. The spatial distributions highlight a complex structure at the nebula’s centre. Highly ionized species such as [Mg VII] and [Si VII] show compact structures, while lower ionization species such as H+ extend much farther outwards, forming filament-defined rims that delineate a bubble. Within the bubble, the H+ and H2 emission coincide, while the PAH emission appears farther out, indicating an ionization structure distinct from typical photodissociation regions, such as the Orion Bar. This may be the first identification of a PAH formation site in a PN. This PN appears to be shaped not by a steady, continuous outflow, but by a series of dynamic, impulsive bubble ejections, creating local conditions conducive to PAH formation. A dusty torus surrounds the core, primarily composed of large (μm-sized) silicate grains with crystalline components. The long-lived torus contains a substantial mass of material, which could support an equilibrium chemistry and a slow dust-formation process.
1 INTRODUCTION
Planetary nebulae (PNe) are excellent testbeds for studying the physics and chemistry of photoionized and photondissociated regions (PDRs), which are irradiated by intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation fields. Some central stars of PNe possess dense, dusty tori or discs. Since these stars emit strongly in the UV, PNe containing dusty tori or discs provide opportunities to examine the transition from ionized to neutral and molecular gas within a torus, under varying UV radiation field strength, fast stellar wind, and dust attenuation. These processes are also relevant to star-forming regions and protoplanetary discs. A key advantage of PNe is their large angular extent, allowing them to be spatially resolved with modern telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Low- and intermediate-mass (1–8 M⊙) evolved stars – asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars – are an important source of stardust in galaxies (e.g. Dwek 1998; Matsuura et al. 2009a). The processing of this stardust in the interstellar medium (ISM) can be traced by comparing the composition of stardust to that of interstellar dust (Kemper, Vriend & Tielens 2004). It is unclear, however, in what form stardust from AGB stars and their descendants, such as PNe, enters the ISM. This is because (1) evidence is accumulating that their winds have complex, non-spherical structures, such as discs or tori, often associated with binary companions (e.g. Balick & Frank 2002; Sahai, Morris & Villar 2011); (2) it is unclear how freshly made stardust is affected by the harsh UV radiation field or dynamical environment that prevails in PNe (Waters et al. 1998.1; Woods et al. 2003), whose central stars have energetic fast winds and extreme radiation fields (Balick et al. 2023). The presence of the discs and tori could modify the dust grain size and composition by frequent collisions of grains during long time-scale exposures to the UV radiation from the central stars.
The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)/Integral Field Unit (IFU) spectrometer onboard JWST provides an excellent opportunity to probe the composition of gas and dust in heavily UV-irradiated, but also dust-obscured regions, like the tori in bipolar PNe. In order to study extreme chemical and physical conditions, we chose the PN NGC 6302 for our target. This object is one of the most recognizable PNe due to its spectacular bipolar shape (Balick & Frank 2002), displayed in Fig. 1. Based on the first deep optical images obtained of NGC 6302, Evans (1959) described its optical appearance as ‘two lobes of luminous gas, shaped like the wings of a butterfly, separated by a relatively dark lane’, where the dark lane is the dusty torus (Lester & Dinerstein 1984; Matsuura et al. 2009.1b). It has one of the highest estimated initial masses (5–6 M⊙) and the hottest central star (220 000 K) of any Galactic PN, with high nitrogen abundance, making it a rare PN descended from an intermediate-mass star (Wright et al. 2011.1).
Figure 1. Panel (a): The JWST/MIRI mapping area (the white box) of the CH1 short sub-band overlaid on the HST three-colour composite image of NGC 6302. North is at the top, and east is to the left. The colour assignments of the HST/WFC3 image are F164N (blue), F673N (green), and F658N (red). The HST images are from Kastner et al. (2022) and Balick et al. (2023). Panel (b): A zoom-in of the core region of the HST image. Panel (c): The same zoom-in of the core region is now shown by features detected with JWST/MIRI and ALMA. The MIRI image is composed of H I at 5.907 μm, [Fe II] at 5.34 μm, H2 at 6.91 μm, and ALMA 13CO 2–1. The white circle marks the location of the central source.
One of the important characteristics of NGC 6302 is the presence of both oxygen-rich and carbon-rich dust within a single object. Once formed and ejected, CO molecules lock up C and O atoms. Depending on the C/O abundance ratio, an excess of C atoms forms carbon-bearing molecules and dust, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), while an excess of O atoms forms oxygen-rich molecules and dust, such as silicates. Both crystalline silicates and PAHs are detected in NGC 6302, amid an O-rich gas chemistry (C/O ~0.4; Wright et al. 2011.1). It has been hypothesized that the crystalline silicates formed in the dusty torus (Waters et al. 1998.1; Molster et al. 1999), where the high density and strong UV irradiation enabled slow annealing of dust grains or dust processing over long time-scales (~105 yr; Molster et al. 1999), but this hypothesis has yet to be confirmed. We present JWST MIRI IFU mapping of the core of NGC 6302, allowing a detailed morphological snapshot of atomic lines, H2, PAHs, and crystalline silicate components. The MIRI IFU map reveals the stratification of ionized gas in a bubble: atomic lines with higher ionization potential are emitted in a compact region, while lines with lower ionization potential are more extended. H2 is found in arc-like filaments at slightly larger radii. These new JWST spatio-kinematic 3D maps capture for the first time how PAHs and crystalline silicates form, in a spatially resolved manner. The detection of the central source is reported in a separate paper (Wesson et al., in preparation).
Mikako Matsuura, Kevin Volk, Patrick Kavanagh, Bruce Balick, Roger Wesson, Albert A Zijlstra, Harriet L Dinerstein, Els Peeters, N C Sterling, Jan Cami, M J Barlow, Joel Kastner, Jeremy R Walsh, L B F M Waters, Naomi Hirano, Isabel Aleman, Jeronimo Bernard-Salas, Charmi Bhatt, Joris Blommaert, Nicholas Clark, Olivia Jones, Kay Justtanont, F Kemper, Kathleen E Kraemer, Eric Lagadec, J Martin Laming, F J Molster, Paula Moraga Baez, H Monteiro, Anita M S Richards, Raghvendra Sahai, G C Sloan, Maryam Torki, Peter A M van Hoof, Nicholas J Wright, Finnbar Wilson, Alexander Csukai
The JWST/MIRI view of the planetary nebula NGC 6302 – I. A UV-irradiated torus and a hot bubble triggering PAH formation
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 542(2), 1287-1307; DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staf1194
Copyright: © 2025 The Royal Astronomical Society
Published by Oxford University Press. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
For creationists, this is yet another blow. Their worldview depends on a parochial, human-centred universe in which Earth was specially created, and life was conjured into existence by command. What the JWST reveals, however, is a Universe that is neither small nor special, but vast, ancient, and productive — a place where matter is recycled and life’s raw ingredients are continuously manufactured.
Each new discovery pushes creationist mythology further into irrelevance. The “dome over a flat Earth” cosmology of the Bible was already long discredited; now even the supposed mystery of life’s origins is being dissolved by evidence. Instead of a divine hand, we see stellar furnaces and nebulae endlessly sowing the seeds of organic chemistry.
The more we learn, the more it becomes obvious: science explains the Universe in ways the authors of the Bible could never have imagined, and in doing so, it leaves creationism with nothing but outdated myths and wishful thinking.
Science progresses human knowledge and understanding; creationism seeks to keep it in the ignorant and fearful Bronze Age.
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