Astronomers took for the first time a close-up photo of a super-huge red star outside the Milky Way, the Southern European Observatory released on November 22.
WOH G64 star is 160,000 light-years from Earth, located in the Big Magellan Clouds - a satellite Galaxy of the Milky Way.
WOH G64 is about 2,000 times larger than the Sun and is classified as a red super giant star.
According to the Southern European Observatory, WOH G64 is spraying dust and gas in the final stage before becoming a super tan star.
We have discovered egg-shaped patches surrounding the star, said Keiichi Ohnaka, an award-winningophysicist at Andres Bello University in Chile. We are excited that this could be related to the launch of matter from a Yielding tailgate by a supernylon explosion.
Astronomers have known about this star for "multiple decades" and called it a "giant star".
We discovered that the star has undergone significant changes over the past 10 years, giving us a rare opportunity to see the life of a star in real time, said research co-author Gerd Weigelt, a professor of astronomy at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomics.
In the final stage of life, super giant red stars like WOH G64 remove the outer layers of gas and dust in a process that could 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.
