The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed a rare scene of fire and ice, in which hailstones of a sort survive in a blanket of dust around a hot, dying star.

The Bug Nebula, also known as NGC 6302, is about 4,000 light-years away in the southern sky. The central star long ago shed its outer layers, casting off the material that the star now lights up.

The image was released today. Click here to see a larger version.

"Ice is known in a few other objects in a similar phase of evolution," said Albert Zijlstra from UMIST in Manchester, the United Kingdom. "However, the other objects all have relatively cool stars, roughly 10 to 20 thousand degrees. This star is more than ten times hotter and the fact that ice survives in this environment is unique."

The star is at least 450,000 degrees Fahrenheit (250,000 Celsius) and possibly twice that hot. "It is the hottest star I am aware of," Zijlstra told SPACE.com.

The star in NGC 6302 is 50 times hotter than the Sun. It has used up most of its hydrogen, and nuclear burning occurs very near the surface as its life draws to a close. It would be difficult to find a more sizzling star.

"Stars that reach higher temperatures are rare and keep those temperatures for such a short while that the chances of actually detecting one is very small," Zijlstra said.

So how can there be ice nearby?

The hailstones consist of dust grains with a layer of frozen, crystalline water, which formed as water vapor when the star initially expelled material and temperatures were relatively low, he said. The expelled gas then expanded into space and the water froze onto grains of dust.

A dark lane is visible near the heart of the action, extending into dark areas above and below. It is a donut-shaped ring of material surrounding the star.

"This is the dense torus where the hailstones are found," Zijlstra said. "It is dark because of the large amount of dust, which absorbs any light passing through it. This is also the reason the ice survives the onslaught of the hot star."

In fact, it's not clear if the central star is a loner or perhaps has a companion.

The wispy structures in the nebula are created by fast winds of particles from the star slamming into slower-moving material that had been previously ejected, mostly about 10,000 years ago. In the new, detailed photograph, Zijlstra and his colleagues traced the outflows -- earlier outflows are now sculpting the scene farther from the star -- and noted that they vary.

"Flows at different distances from the star seem to point in different directions," he said. "These can indicate that the central star is a binary," a pair of stars in which the changing direction of the outflow is due the main star wobbling like a spinning top, its axis describing an imaginary cone shape in space.

Alas, the star itself remains invisible, even to Hubble.