Until now, stars in other galaxies have been visible as little more than points of light, even when observed using telescopes. Now, thanks to the Euro

First close-up image of a star outside Milky Way shows supergiant in ‘cocoon’

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2024-11-23 13:00:03

Until now, stars in other galaxies have been visible as little more than points of light, even when observed using telescopes. Now, thanks to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), astronomers have captured the first zoomed-in image.

“We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star,” said Dr Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist at the Andrés Bello National University in Chile. “We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion.”

The star, called WOH G64, is located 160,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the small galaxies that orbits the Milky Way. It is thought to be the largest star in the galaxy, classified as a red supergiant and about 2,000 times the diameter of the sun. Even so, observing the behemoth star in detail still required a resolution equivalent to seeing an astronaut walking on the moon from Earth.

“We’re not able to do that with normal telescopes,” said Dr Jacco van Loon, a reader in astrophysics at Keele University and a co-author of a paper outlining the observations published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.