AKIPRESS.COM - Giant windy stars, known as Wolf-Rayets, end their lives in powerful supernova explosions, according to a new study.The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, provides new insights into the fate of these stars previously thought to have gone out with a whimper rather than a bang.

Wolf-Rayets are giant aging stars more than 20 times the mass of the Sun. These stars have extremely powerful stellar winds, blowing off huge amounts of material at speeds of 2000 kilometres per second, BBC Science said.

Scientists led by Dr Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute in Israel, made the breakthrough discovery by identifying the chemical signature or spectra of a Wolf-Rayet star in the stellar debris of a supernova soon after the explosion.

Supernova can occur when stars far more massive than the Sun run out fuel and suddenly collapse, resulting in an explosion that briefly outshines an entire galaxy.

Depending of the size of the original star, these events result in the creation of either a superdense object called a neutron star, or an even more exotic creature known as a black hole.