First Detailed Image of Red Supergiant WOH G64 Captured Outside Milky Way

Nov 21, 2024, 04:00 PM

Astronomers have, for the first time, captured a detailed image of a star outside the Milky Way galaxy. The star, WOH G64, is a massive red supergiant located 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), scientists observed that WOH G64 is 2,000 times larger than the Sun and is surrounded by a cocoon of gas and dust. "For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way," said Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile. This dying star is expected to go supernova, although the timing of the explosion remains uncertain. The findings were published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and provide unprecedented insight into the behavior of massive stars nearing the end of their life cycles.