Scientists have reportedly taken the first-ever close-up image of a star outside the Milky Way, capturing a blurry shot of a dying giant that is 2,000 times larger than the Sun.
About 160,000 light-years from Earth, the star WOH G64 is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to our Milky Way.
It is a red supergiant that is the largest type of star in the Universe as it expands in space as it approaches its explosive death.
The image was captured by a team of researchers using a new instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.
Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist at the Andres Bello National University in Chile, stated that "for the first time, we were able to make a magnified image of a dying star."
The image shows the bright, though blurry yellow star enclosed in an oval outline.
"We found an egg-shaped cocoon tightly surrounding the star," Ohnaka said in the statement.
"We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before the supernova explosion," added the lead author of the study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The Ohnaka team has been observing the star for some time.
In 2005 and 2007, they used the Very Large Telescope's interferometer, which combines light from two telescopes, to learn more about the star.
But capturing an image remained out of reach until a new instrument called GRAVITY - which combines the light of four telescopes - recently came along.
When astronomers compared all their observations, they were surprised to find that the star had fainted over the past decade.
"The star has undergone a significant change in the last 10 years, giving us the rare opportunity to observe the star's life in real time," says study co-author Gerd Weigelt of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
Red supergiants - such as Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion - are "some of the most extreme of their kind and any drastic change could bring them close to an explosive end," added study co-author Jaco van Loon of Keele University in the United Kingdom.
In the final stages of their lives before exploding into supernovae, red supergiants shed their outer layers of gas and dust in a process that can take thousands of years.
It may be this ejected material that causes the star to appear fainter, scientists believe.
It could also explain the strange shape of the dust cocoon that surrounds the star.
Another explanation for the egg-shaped cocoon could be that there is another star hidden somewhere inside that has not yet been discovered. | BGNES
