Science: Astronomers have captured a “zoomed-in” image of a star outside the Milky Way for the first time. The team brought the massive red supergiant star called WOH G64 into focus using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI).
WOH G64 is located 160,000 light-years away in the Milky Way’s satellite dwarf galaxy companion, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Astronomers have known about this star’s existence for some time, and it has earned the nickname “Behemoth Star” because it is 2,000 times the size of the Sun.
The VLTI was able to observe this distant star in such detail that it even revealed the cocoon of gas and dust surrounding it. These outflows of matter indicate that WOH G64 is dying, in the final stages of its life, leading to a massive supernova explosion. “For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star outside our galaxy,” team leader Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist at Universidad Andres Bello, said in a statement. “We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon surrounding the star.
“We are excited because this may be related to the massive ejection of matter from the dying star before the supernova explosion.” Astronomers have captured dozens of “zoomed-in” images of stars within the galaxy, but it has taken until now to capture a star beyond our galaxy with the same level of detail. WOH G64 has been a target for Ohnaka and his colleagues for some time; the team studied it with the VLTI, located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, in 2005 and 2007.
