The star is a red supergiant (like the famous Betelgeuse) and it sits in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that contains some 30 billion stars. As the star has spat gas and dust into its vicinity, that material formed a cocoon around the star, seen in the below image as a thin elliptical ring. “For the first time, we succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own galaxy,” said Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist at Chile’s Universidad Andrés Bello and lead author of the research, in an email to Gizmodo. This means that the dying star is ejecting a lot of material.”The team chose to image WOH G64 for a couple of reasons. Until then, we’ll have to be satisfied with this eerie, admittedly blurry Eye-of-Sauron-esque very of the red supergiant.

Source: The Star November 21, 2024 22:28 UTC