In 2016, a butterfly Rydberg molecule was observed by a collaboration involving researchers from the Kaiserslautern University of Technology and Purdue University. A butterfly Rydberg molecule is a weak pairing of a Rydberg atom and a ground state atom that is enhanced by the presence of a shape resonance in the scattering between the Rydberg electron and the ground state atom. This new kind of atomic bond was theorized in 2002 and is characterized by an electron density distribution that resembles the shape of a butterfly. As a consequence of the unconventional binding mechanism, butterfly Rydberg molecules show peculiar properties such as multiple vibrational ground states at different bond lengths and giant dipole moments in excess of 500 debye.