May 22, 2015 11:57 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The Hubble Telescope helped astronomers identify a massive gas disk around a Wolf-Rayet star dubbed "Nasty 1."

According to Space.com, the disk was measured to be three trillion miles wide and was seen engulfing the ever-shrinking star. Wolf-Rayet stars are known for their size - as large as 20 times the mass of the sun - but also because of how they swiftly shed their hydrogen envelope.

The astronomers detailed their observations of Nasty 1 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"We were excited to see this disk-like structure because it may be evidence for a Wolf-Rayet star forming from a binary interaction," study lead author Jon Mauerhan, of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a press 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 team said the disk surrounding Nasty 1 is unlike anything ever observed and is only a few thousand light years from Earth. They said one possibility for why such Wolf-Rayet stars deteriorate so quickly is because others around it are stealing resources.

"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," study co-author Nathan Smith, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in the release. "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."

Wolf-Rayet stars are ultimately mysterious and this study hopes to further expand the astronomical community's knowledge of them.

"That's what we think is happening in Nasty 1," Mauerhan said. "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."

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