Astronomers capture first close-up of a dying star beyond our galaxy

What just happened? For the first time, scientists have captured a detailed close-up image of a red supergiant star nearing the end of its life outside the Milky Way galaxy. The star, known as WOH G64, is located 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way.

The zoomed-in view was made possible by the European Southern Observatory's powerful Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), located in Chile's Atacama Desert. Researchers noted that this was the first time they successfully captured a direct image of a dying star in another galaxy at such close range.

The observations revealed the red supergiant expelling gas and dust as it approaches the final stages before going supernova, one of the last evolutionary phases of a massive star. Ohnaka's team found the star encased in an egg-shaped cocoon of ejected material, indicating that a ...