Hubble Space telescope has discovered a bizarre, strange and furious star in space. It is found to be bigger than our sun and is also called a cannibal star.
The star discovered is nicknamed Nasty 1.
The star discovered by Hubble hardly looks like our star, the sun. It has an exposed core, because its outer layers are broken down.
The star that have exposed helium cores due to breakdown of their outer hydrogen layers belong to the Wolf-Rayet Family.
The star is enveloped in a thick cloud of Heavy gas forming a pancake shape. This star gives a rare chance to astronomers to observe its core.
Scientists are now observing how the rapidly aging star is breaking down.
Jon Mauerhan of the University of California at Berkeley and lead researcher of the study said that the mysterious star is probably formed due to a binary interaction between other stars; this means that there is another star which is consuming the gas released by Nasty 1 from its surface.
Nathan Smith, co-author of the study said, “We’re finding that it is hard to form all the Wolf-Rayet stars we observe by the traditional wind mechanism, because mass loss isn’t as strong as we used to think. Mass exchange in binary systems seems to be vital to account for Wolf-Rayet stars and the supernovae they make and catching binary stars in this short-lived phase will help us understand this process.”
Scientists are perplexed because the process of binary interaction takes about 100,000 years to complete while the disk produced by it is visible for less than 10,000 years.
Researchers have studied more stars within the Wolf-Rayet belt and found that many seem to have a binary origin like the Nasty 1.
The findings of the study are published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.