Astronomers have captured the first close-up image of a red supergiant star outside the Milky Way, the European Southern Observatory announced on November 22.
The star WOH G64 is 160,000 light-years from Earth, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud - a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
WOH G64 is about 2,000 times more massive than the Sun and is classified as a red supergiant.
According to the European Southern Observatory, WOH G64 is spewing out dust and gas in the final stages before becoming a supernova.
“We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon around the star,” said Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist at Andres Bello University in Chile and co-author of the study. “We are excited because this could be related to the ejection of material from a dying star before a supernova explosion.”
Astronomers have known about the star for "decades" and call it a "giant star."
“We found that this star has undergone significant change over the past 10 years, giving us a rare opportunity to witness the life of a star in real time,” said study co-author Gerd Weigelt, professor of astronomy at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
In the final stages of life, red supergiant stars like WOH G64 shed their outer layers of gas and dust in a process that can take thousands of years.
“This star is one of the most extreme stars and any drastic change could bring it closer to an explosive end,” said Jacco van Loon, co-author of the study and director of the Keele Observatory at Keele University in the UK, who has been observing WOH G64 since the 1990s.
