Wolf-Rayet Artifacts occur when a very massive, very hot and bright star has run out of hydrogen fuel and begins to fuse helium into oxygen and other heavier elements toward the end of its life. Wolf-Rayet stars can have surface temperatures of 40,000 to 400,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's four to forty times as hot as the surface of the sun and is hotter than almost any other kind of star. And they can be hundreds to hundreds of thousands of times brighter than the sun. All this energy heats up and ionizes the material blown from the star's surface in earlier phases of its life often forming beautiful, variegated shells of colorful hydrogen, oxygen, and other gasses. Wolf-Rayet stars were first observed and identified in Paris in 1867 by the French astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet.