Astronomers using the VLTI and GRAVITY have captured the first close up image of a star outside the Milky Way. It's going to explode.
WOH G64 is a massive red supergiant star in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Thanks to the ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, this is the first close-up picture of a star in another galaxy. Image Credit: ESO/K. Ohnaka et al.
They’ve published their images and the results of their observations of the star in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Their research is titled “ WOH G64 is a whopping 160,000 light-years away. Even though the red supergiant is a behemoth that’s 2,000 times larger than the Sun, that’s an enormous distance. It’s all because of the VLTI and one of its newer instruments, calledWhen Ohnaka and his colleagues saw the images, they were buoyed with excitement. The images show a cocoon of dust surrounding the star, evidence that it’s convulsed and shed some of its outer layers.
Ohnaka and his colleagues have been observing WOH for a long time, but had to wait for better instruments to get a closer look.Gerd Weigelt is an astronomy professor at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and a co-author of the research. “We have found that the star has been experiencing a significant change in the last 10 years, providing us with a rare opportunity to witness a star’s life in real time,” Weigelt said.
The images show an elongated, compact emission region in near-infrared surrounding the star. This suggests that hot new dust has formed near the star, which helps obscure the star itself. The star’s NIR continuum has shifted in the last decade, which also supports the new dust hypothesis. Earlier images from before 2003 show more hydrogen absorption than recent images.
This reconstructed GRAVITY image of WOH G64 is from the research and clearly shows the elongated, cocoon shape. Image Credit: Ohnaka et al. 2024.
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