One-of-a-Kind Star Discovered in Our Milky Way Galaxy is Called Nasty

Astronomers have spent years trying to determine the strange behavior of an aging star nicknamed "Nasty 1," residing in our Milky Way galaxy. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have now discovered that a pancake-shape disk of gas encircles the star. The vast disk is nearly 1,000 times the diameter of our solar system.

The disk itself glows brightly in the light of ionized nitrogen. The central star itself gets its name from its catalog name of NaSt1. It's thought to be a Wolf-Rayet star, which is a massive, rapidly evolving star weighing well over10 times the mass of our sun. The star is losing its hydrogen-filled outer layers quickly, exposing its super-hot and extremely bright helium-burning core.

Nasty 1 is also thought to have a companion star. It's possible that the gravitational interactions between them may have created the gas disk. Both stars are heavily obscured by gas and dust in the disk, and Hubble observations suggest that as Nasty 1 sheds its weight, some of the mass is falling onto a companion star and some is leaking into space, forming the disk.

The vast structure is nearly 2 trillion miles wide, and the disk itself is clumpy because astronomers think that the outbursts occur sporadically.

The image is actually tinted blue to bring out the details in the disk. For example, the knot at the left of center is an unusually bright clump of gas. In this case, the astronomers were surprised to find the disk-like structure, which had never been seen before around a Wolf-Rayet star in our galaxy.

"We were excited to see this disk-like structure because it maybe evidence for a Wolf-Rayet star forming from a binary interaction," said Jon Mauerhan, one of the researchers, in a news release. "There are very few examples in the galaxy of this process in action because this phase is short-lived, perhaps lasting only a hundred thousand years, while the timescale over which a resulting disk is visible could be only ten thousand years or less."

The findings are published in the journal The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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