Here is the first close-up photo of a star located outside our galaxy 🌟

"For the first time, we have successfully captured a close-up image of a dying star in a galaxy located beyond our Milky Way," explains Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile.

Located 160,000 light-years away from us, the star WOH G64 was imaged thanks to the impressive sharpness of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The new observations reveal a star expelling gas and dust, in the final stages before becoming a supernova.


"We discovered an ovoid cocoon closely surrounding the star," explains Keiichi Ohnaka, lead author of a study reporting the observations published today in *Astronomy & Astrophysics*. "We are excited because this could be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star prior to the supernova explosion."

While astronomers have captured about two dozen close-up images of stars in our galaxy, revealing their properties, countless other stars exist in other galaxies, so far away that detailed observation of a single one has proven extremely difficult. Until now!

The newly imaged star, WOH G64, is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the small galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Astronomers have known this star for decades and have fittingly nicknamed it "the giant star." Approximately 2,000 times larger than our Sun, WOH G64 is classified as a red supergiant.

Keiichi Ohnaka's team has long been interested in this giant star. In 2005 and 2007, they used the ESO's VLTI in Chile's Atacama Desert to learn more about the star's characteristics and continued studying it in the years that followed. However, obtaining an actual image of this star remained a challenge.

To achieve the desired image, the team had to wait for the development of one of the second-generation instruments of the VLTI, GRAVITY. After comparing their new results with earlier observations of WOH G64, they were surprised to find that the star had dimmed over the past decade.

"We found that the star underwent a significant change over the last ten years, giving us a rare opportunity to witness the life of a star in real-time," explains Gerd Weigelt, professor of astronomy at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and a co-author of the study.

During the final phase of their life, red supergiants like WOH G64 shed their outer layers of gas and dust, a process that can last thousands of years. "This star is one of the most extreme of its kind, and any radical change could bring it closer to an explosive end," adds co-author Jacco van Loon, director of the Keele Observatory at Keele University in the UK, who has been observing WOH G64 since the 1990s.

The team believes that this ejected matter might also be responsible for the star's dimming as well as the unexpected shape of the dust cocoon surrounding it. The new image reveals that the cocoon is elongated, surprising researchers who expected a different shape based on previous observations and computer models. The team speculates that the ovoid shape of the cocoon could be explained either by material ejection from the star or by the influence of an as-yet-undiscovered companion star.

As the star grows dimmer, capturing further close-up images becomes increasingly difficult, even with the VLTI. Nevertheless, planned upgrades to the telescope's instrumentation, such as the future GRAVITY+, promise to change this soon. "Follow-up observations with ESO's instruments will be crucial to understanding what is happening within the star," concludes Keiichi Ohnaka.