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For the first time, scientists have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in picture of a star in another galaxy. The star, known as WOH G64, seems to be cloaked in an egg-shaped cocoon and is located 160,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.
The scientists have described their observations in the paper, ‘Imaging the innermost circumstellar environment of the red supergiant WOH G64 in the Large Magellanic Cloud’, published by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics last week.
Until now, researchers have been able to take pictures of stars in other galaxies that show them as little more than points of light. However, with the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), they have now revealed a detailed image of WOH G64.
VLTI comprises four 8-metre diameter telescopes situated in Cerro Paranal, Chile. It also has an interferometer called GRAVITY that combines the light from the telescopes to achieve the resolution of a much larger telescope, according to a report by The New York Times.
WOH G64 is believed to be the largest galaxy in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The star is around 2,000 times the diameter of the Sun.
The new photo has revealed that WOH G64 is entering the last stages of its life. In recent years, the star has blown off its outer layer, and it is now surrounded by wreaths and arcs of gas and dust.
Dr Jacco van Loon, co-author of the study, told The Guardian, “Massive stars explode with an energy equivalent to the Sun shining for all of its 10 billion years of life… People have seen these supernova explosions, and astronomers have found some of the stars that exploded in older images. But we have never seen a star change in a way that signals its imminent death.”
When big stars like WOH G64 exhaust their nuclear fuel which keeps them burning, their cores collapse. Some massive stars collapse directly to form a black hole — a region in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, including light and matter. Others collapse and lead to an explosion called supernova, which produces many elements such as zinc, silver, tin, gold, mercury, lead, and uranium.
