[merged] One-of-a-Kind Star Nicknamed 'Nasty'

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Hubble Observes One-of-a-Kind Star Nicknamed 'Nasty'

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.

Source

[Taun]

The artist's rendering is nice and all.. but it would have been nice if they had included the actual photo taken by Hubble...

Oh well... Thanks for posting this Waspie!

[Waspie_Dwarf]

The artist's rendering is nice and all.. but it would have been nice if they had included the actual photo taken by Hubble...

They did, you needed to follow the link towards the top of the page marked "release images".

However there is no need to do that as I have posted it in the Deep Space and Astronomy section of UM's Space Exploration image gallery:

Hubble Observes One Of A Kind Star Nicknamed 'Nasty'.

[pallidin]

From: http://www.foxnews.c...intcmp=features

An ongoing act of cosmic cannibalism may be responsible for the strange appearance and unprecedented behavior of a gigantic star nicknamed "Nasty 1," a new study reports.

Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have revealed a disk of gas nearly 3 trillion miles wide surrounding Nasty 1, which is a massive, rapidly aging object known as a Wolf-Rayet star.

Wolf-Rayet stars start out big, initially containing at least 20 times more mass than the sun. But their hydrogen-dominated outer layers soon puff up and are lost, exposing the objects' helium-burning cores to space. Astronomers aren't exactly sure how this process unfolds, but they have a few ideas.

Edited May 23, 2015 by pallidin