Washington : 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, reports IANS.
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.
