This star’s nickname is nasty! No, really. With its official catalog name as NaSt1, this strange star has been given the nickname “Nasty 1.” Imaged by NASAHubble within our own Milky Way galaxy, it lives around 3,000 light-years away from Earth and is over 10 times the mass of our Sun. When discovered, it was identified as a Wolf-Rayet star, which is a large, rapidly evolving star. This type of star quickly sheds its outer layers, exposing its hot, bright, helium-burning core. But Nasty 1 exhibited behavior that astronomers didn’t expect from a Wolf-Rayet star — instead of two lobes of gas flowing in opposite directions from the central star, Nasty 1 has a flat, swirling gaseous disk. Estimates suggest that this might be due to an unseen companion star swiping some of the debris. Scientists also estimate that the gas cloud is only a few thousand years old, and that Nasty 1 represents a brief transitory stage in the evolution of these types of stars. Image description: Nasty 1 d...