Though NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers were able to uncover surprising new clues a weird star nicknamed Nasty 1, a Wolf-Rayet star whose behavior has never been seen before in the Milky Way galaxy.
The nickname of the rapidly aging star comes from its catalog name, NaSt1, after Jason Nassau and Charles Stephenson, the astronomers who first spotted it in 1963, according to Washington Post.
Identified as a Wolf-Rayet star, Nasty 1 star may represent a brief transitory stage in the evolution of gigantic stars. Much more massive than the sun, the star quickly loses its hydrogen-filled outer layers, which exposes its extremely hot and bright helium-burning core.
On the other hand, Nasty 1 does not appear to be a typical Wolf-Rayet star as the astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope saw a pancake-shaped disk of gas encircling the star although they had expected to see twin lobes of gas flowing from the star's opposite sides .
Approximately two trillion miles wide, the vast disk may have formed from an unseen companion star that snacked on the newly formed Wolf-Rayet's outer envelope. The nebula surrounding the stars is estimated to a few thousand years old.
"There are very few examples in the galaxy of this process in action because this phase is short-lived, perhaps lasting only a hundred thousand years, while the timescale over which a resulting disk is visible could be only ten thousand years or less," the leader of the astronomers, Jon Mauerhan, explained, Hubble Site quoted him as saying.