An artist's impression of the smaller star believed to be the culprit of the blobs. NASA/ESA/STScI

Scientists have found a bizarre star 1,200 light-years from Earth that appears to be shooting giant balls of plasma twice the size of Mars into space. Yes, you read that right.

The discovery was made by scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and published in The Astrophysical Journal, led by Raghvendra Sahai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The star in question is V Hydrae, a bloated red giant. Observing the star from 2002 to 2004, and 2011 to 2013, the scientists used spectroscopy to find there were super-hot blobs – described as "cannonballs" by NASA – more than 9,400°C (17,000°F) being fired into space from the star. That’s twice the temperature of the surface of the Sun.

But the red giant itself could not be the source of the blobs. Red giants are dying stars in their latter stages with limited nuclear fuel, having expanded massively in size and shedding their outer layers into space.

Thus, the researchers suggest there is another smaller star orbiting this one, in a highly elliptical orbit. This star swings through the outer layers of the red giant, where it picks up material and forms a disk. As this material builds up, it reaches a tipping point and is eventually fired out into space. And it has been doing this for the last 400 years or so.

Shown is the step by step process of how the blobs are created. NASA/ESA/STScI