Scientists have managed to capture the first detailed image of a dying star outside our Milky Way Galaxy, encased in a strange, egg-shaped cocoon. The star, identified as WOH G64, is located 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud and is surrounded by a plume of gas and dust – indicating it was in the final stages of its life. During a star’s final stages, it turns into a red supergiant star before dying in a massive cosmic explosion known as a supernova.
“For the first time, we have managed to capture a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way,” said Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile and lead author. of the study.
WOH G64 was captured using the GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). With a size about 2,000 times larger than that of our Sun, WOH G64 offers insight into the life cycle of a star and how it goes out with a fascinating bang.
“We have discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star. We are excited because this could be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion,” Mr Ohnaka added.
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Years of research
Scientists have been interested in the red supergiant for almost twenty years. In 2005 and 2007, Mr Ohnaka and his team used ESO’s VLTI in Chile’s Atacama Desert to learn more about the star’s characteristics and continued studying it in subsequent years. However, an actual image of the star remained elusive. To click the first, detailed image, the team had to wait for the development of one of the VLTI’s second-generation instruments.
‘Major stars explode with an energy equal to that of the Sun shining for the entire ten billion years of its life. People have seen these supernova explosions, and astronomers have found some of the stars that exploded in older images. But we’ve never seen a star. change in a way that signals impending death.”
The researchers believe that the gas and dust around the star, known as abrasive material, may be responsible for the dimming and the unexpected shape of the cocoon around the star. The new image shows the cocoon has expanded, which surprised scientists, who expected a different shape based on previous observations and computer models.
The team believes that the egg-shaped shape of the cocoon can be explained by shedding from the star or by the influence of a yet undiscovered companion star.