It is like watching the trail of a bullet travel in slow-mo, magnified to the nth degree. Astronomers chanced upon a high speed red star zipping across, thanks to the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) at NASA.

The Explorer was sweeping the sky using ultraviolet light when it came upon the star in question, Mira A. Mira is Latin for ‘wonderful.’ While the star itself has been the source of wonder for more than 400 years, alternating in brightness at specific intervals and traveling through space at the speed of sound, what has scientists amazed is the star’s tail.

Scientists say there has been nothing like Mira's tail on view earlier. The huge tail, resembling the rear end of a comet, generates a wake 13 light years long. To give a more realistic picture, 13 light years is equivalent to the distance separating the sun and its closes star neighbor, three times over.

The whopper of a tail is made mostly of cold hydrogen and other elements that have shed themselves from the star’s surface over the past 30,000 years or so. Along with this, the star’s tail has also had interstellar dust sticking to it during its sojourn.

The first people to view the tail were Christopher Martin and his team of astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Martin said the tail had started forming probably at the time Neanderthal man was roaming the earth, and had been steadily growing ever since.

The star itself had caught the eye of the astronomers from the 17th century, as they tried to figure out the reason for its periodic brightness shifts (every 322 days). Researchers now think they know the reason for the shifts in brightness.

They believe the star had burnt out its nuclear fuel core, consisting of hydrogen and helium, and formed the resulting carbon and oxygen, elements that were heavier and resulted in the star bloating up into a reddish giant.

Scientists are claiming the sighting is a very important step, as it is likely to give insights into the death of stars.