About 700 light-years away, the turbulent binary star system called R Aquarii is experiencing violent eruptions that spew out huge, bright filaments of gas.

This new image from the Hubble Telescope offers a stunning close-up of the star system's volcanic activity.

The scale of the eruptions is extraordinary even on a cosmic scale; the exploding material can be traced at least 248 billion miles away from R Aquarii, a distance equivalent to 24 times the diameter of our solar system.

This and similar images from Hubble are expected to revolutionize our understanding of unique stellar structures like R Aquarii.

Image description:

A bright binary star surrounded by a colorful nebula against the black background of space. The central star is a large white dot surrounded by a circular glow. It is surrounded by a series of large, X-shaped diffraction spikes. Above, below, to the left and right of the star, the nebula stretches in long, curved shapes made of thin, multicolored filaments - mostly red and greenish colors, but glowing a bright cyan near the star, whose light illuminates the gas.

 

Image credits: NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble)

Doesn't it look like a bird in flight?