Astronomers
using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered surprising new clues
about a hefty, rapidly aging star whose behavior has never been seen
before in our Milky Way galaxy. In fact, the star is so weird that
astronomers have nicknamed it “Nasty 1,” a play on its catalog name of
NaSt1. The star 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
our sun. The star loses its hydrogen-filled outer layers quickly,
exposing its super-hot and extremely bright helium-burning core.
But Nasty 1 doesn’t look like a typical Wolf-Rayet star. The astronomers
using Hubble had expected to see twin lobes of gas flowing from
opposite sides of the star, perhaps similar to those emanating from the
massive star Eta Carinae, which is a Wolf-Rayet candidate.
Instead, Hubble revealed a pancake-shaped disk of gas encircling the
star. The vast disk is nearly 2 trillion miles wide, and may have formed
from an unseen companion star that snacked on the outer envelope of the
newly formed Wolf-Rayet. 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 Earth.
Credits: NASA/Hubble
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