Because it is so far from us, the apparent size of the spiral around the star is so small that its discovery relied on advanced imaging techniques that utilized the full resolving power of the Keck Telescope , the world's largest telescope. Wolf-Rayet stars, so named after the two astronomers who first discovered them, are hot massive luminous stars. They are typically 3 times the size and 25 times heavier than our sun, and would outshine it by a factor of 100000. This is the same ratio as the brightness of our Sun compared to our Moon. This results in a dense, high-velocity stellar wind surrounding the star that first attracted the attention of astronomers.
Telescope is shown here.
This scale corresponds to twice the diameter of the orbit of Pluto around the Sun. One AU is equal to 93 million miles and is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The image is so small it is equivalent to seeing details on the head of a pin at a distance of 2 miles. The image was reconstructed using the technique of aperture masking interferometry, in which most of the area of the Keck telescope was masked off, making it equivalent to 36 small circular regions or holes in which light could go through and interfere. I telescope and reconstructed into an image using software originally developed for radio interferometry.