This star is nasty on a cosmic scale.
Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have recently learned more about a star lovingly referred to as Nasty-1 -- a nickname derived from the star's catalog name: NaSt1.
Nasty-1 was first observed decades ago, and is known as a Wolf-Rayet star. These kinds of stellar objects are much larger than the sun and go through a more rapid rapid evolution. These stars blow their outer layers of hydrogen into space, revealing a "super-hot and extremely bright helium-burning core," Hubble said.
Researchers using Hubble recently discovered that Nasty-1 -- located about 3,000 light-years from Earth -- even more strange than initially expected. Observers expected to see two lobes of gas coming from the opposite ends of Nasty-1, but instead, Hubble photos show that the star is actually surrounded by a flat disk of gas.
The star shines about 3,000 light-years from Earth, and the gas disk around the star is about 2 trillion miles wide.
It's possible that the disk was created by "an unseen companion star that snacked on the outer envelope of the newly formed Wolf-Rayet," Hubble said in a statement.