PARIS—A fuzzy image of a dying giant 2,000 times larger than the Sun was captured by scientists on Thursday, marking the first time they have ever obtained a close-up of a star outside of the Milky Way.
The star WOH G64 is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, about 160,000 light years away from Earth. Because red supergiants expand into space as they approach their cataclysmic deaths, they are the largest star type in the cosmos.
A group of scientists used a brand-new instrument from the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile to take the picture. “We have managed to capture a close-up picture of a dying star for the first time,” stated Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist at Andres Bello National University in Chile. The image displays an oval outline enclosing a bright, if fuzzy, yellow star.
In a statement, Ohnaka remarked, “We found an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star.” The lead author of a study that was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics noted, “We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion.”
The star has been under observation by Ohnaka’s team for a while. They obtained further information about the star between 2005 and 2007 by utilizing the interferometer of the Very Large Telescope, which fused the light from two telescopes.
However, until a new device called GRAVITY, which combines the light of four telescopes, just went online, taking an image was still impossible. The astronomers were shocked to discover that the star had dimmed throughout the previous ten years after comparing all of their measurements.
