The Butterfly Nebula and life of a star

The Butterfly Nebula is the product of a star in its death throes. It's a star much like the one we see rising in the east every morning. This will happen to us. This is our future. The star is about 3,800 light-years away, in the constellation Scorpius. Those wings are actually hot streams of particles being ejected by the star into interstellar space. As the star starts to run out of hydrogen and helium fuel, its core contracts, and, simultaneously, the intense radiation of the star blows the outer layers into space. It's not an explosion but more of a spewing. Here, the star itself is unseen, obscured by dust. The dust and slower-moving gas form a torus, like a napkin ring, which forces the spew to be conical rather than spherical.
Our knowledge about star mechanics comes largely from models, equations, number-crunching. But this Hubble image of the butterfly lets the models spring to life. Before the rise of scientific astronomy, stars were boring. No one knew that a star and our sun were the same thing. This ancient universe was a two-dimensional backdrop for human actions, like the painted sets in "The Wizard of Oz." And yet the butterfly tells us the truth: The universe is wild. The universe evolves, and change is the norm. There's something of a cosmic ecosystem out there -- the cosmosphere, if you wish. And the death of a star is cosmic fertilizer.
If you go back to the primordial universe, you find only the simplest elements, primarily hydrogen and helium. The heavier stuff, such as carbon and nitrogen, is cooked up inside stars. The Butterfly Nebula is a freeze frame of the seeding of the universe with the material for future stars, planets and life. The universe, to be chemically interesting, and to give rise to life, has to have stars. And stars have to die. Carl Sagan was right: We are star stuff. Life as we know it is constructed around four of the five most common elements in the universe: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. Only the inert element helium is left out of the recipe (unless you inhale it, which can make you the life of the party). Life is opportunistic and pragmatic: It uses the most mundane materials butterflying through space.

Maybe life could, in theory, be based on exotic, harder-to-get elements. But life throughout the universe probably uses the stuff we use -- because any other strategy would mean going at things the hard way.