A star that was discovered several years ago has been given a strange new nickname by NASA: Nasty 1.
Why you wonder? The name is a play on the star's catalog name, NaST1, which was derived from the initial two letters in the surnames of the astronomers who discovered the gigantic star in 1963, namely Jason Nassau and Charles Stephenson.
Upon its initial discovery, the Nasty 1 was categorized as a Wolf-Rayet star. These types of stars evolve quickly and are bigger than the sun, containing a mass that is 20 times more. However, Wolf-Rayet stars have outer layers that are dominated by hydrogen. Once these layers start losing the gas, the helium-burning core of the star is exposed to space.
While astronomers are not sure of the unfolding of this process, they have some insights. Some scientists believe that these stars' stellar winds are partially responsible for blowing away the hydrogen-dominated outer layers. Another view is that these outer layers are tapped into by a companion star that has cannibalistic abilities.
Astronomers used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and noticed that the Nasty 1 was encircled by a pancake-like disk of gaseous matter. This disk has a width of 2 trillion miles and could possibly have resulted from a companion star that was not visible. This cannibalistic companion star likely fed on the outer layer of the newly formed Wolf-Rayet star.
The researchers revealed that they have never seen such a disk enveloping a Wolf-Rayet star. They say that the nebula is barely a few thousand years old and is 3,000 light-years away from Earth.
"We think there is a Wolf-Rayet star buried inside the nebula, and we think the nebula is being created by this mass-transfer process. So this type of sloppy stellar cannibalism actually makes Nasty 1 a rather fitting nickname," said Jon Mauerhan, study leader.
While at this juncture it is not clear what fate has in store for Nasty 1 in the long term, Mauerhan says the star's evolutionary trail will be far from boring and the future is "full of all kinds of exotic possibilities." The Wolf-Rayet could also burst as a supernova among other things.
The study is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
