This Giant Star is Behaving Weirdly on its Death March to Supernova

Meet Nasty 1, an extremely massive star (yep, that's the scientific term) located about 3,000 light years away. It's a Wolf-Rayet star, which means a colossal star in its cosmic final days that's shed its hydrogen and is burning blue-hot with helium. Its on its way to a full on supernova.

That's where it stops being ordinary. Unlike previously spotted Wolf-Rayet stars, Nasty 1 doesn't have twin jets of ejecta spewing out either side of it. Instead, a dense, almost galactic-looking cloud roughly shaped like a pancake has circled around it. The culprit is likely a smaller companion star, orbiting at a distance such that it's tugging the gasses outwards and feasting on some of them.

The disk of gas spans about 2 trillion miles across. If it were transplanted into our own star system, it would stretch from the sun beyond the planets and well into the outer Oort Cloud. It's big. But it won't last. A Wolf-Rayet star only stays this way for a few hundred thousand years before preparing to go supernova.

Source: NASA