Say hello to 'nastiest' star ever

5 Dariya News

Washington 23-May-2015

NASA's Hubble space telescope has spotted a weird star in our galaxy and has been nicknamed "nasty" owing to its behaviour never seen before.The hefty, rapidly ageing star "Nasty 1" may represent a brief transitory stage in the evolution of extremely massive stars.First discovered several decades ago, "Nasty 1" was identified as a Wolf-Rayet star, a rapidly-evolving star that is much more massive than Sun.The star loses its hydrogen-filled outer layers quickly, exposing its super-hot and extremely bright helium-burning core.But "Nasty 1" does not look like a typical Wolf-Rayet star.Hubble revealed a pancake-shaped disk of gas encircling the star.The vast disk is nearly two trillion miles wide.Based on current estimates, the nebula surrounding the stars is just a few thousand years old and as close as 3,000 light-years from the Earth.

According to astronomers, this disc is the result of an exceedingly rare occurrence wherein two Wolf-Rayets form within the same solar system and one star's hydrogen fuel is siphoned off by its smaller companion."We were excited to see this disk-like structure because it may be evidence for a Wolf-Rayet star forming from a binary interaction," explained study leader Jon Mauerhan from the University of California-Berkeley in a statement.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."What evolutionary path the star will take is uncertain, but it will definitely not be boring," the authors noted.