A star more than 160,000 light-years from Earth has become the spectacular subject of the first close-up photo of a star in another galaxy.
It is called WOH G64, and it is a red supergiant star located in the Large Magellanic Cloud dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. Because it is so big, it has been known as “” for several years.monster” or “behemoth”, measured at a distance nearly 2,000 times the radius of the Sun.
Its massive size made it an ideal target for portraits using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer. It’s large enough that you can zoom in and see details you’ve never seen before.
“I discovered an egg-shaped coco.”It closely surrounds the star. ” Astrophysicist Keiichi Onaka says: from the National University of Andres Bello, Chile. “We’re excited because this could be related to rapid eruptions.”The action of matter from a dying star before a supernova explosion. ”
Photographing stars here in the Milky Way is difficult enough. The red giant star Betelgeuse is a good example. Despite being less than 764 times the radius of the Sun, 650 light years At great distances, our images of celestial bodies are so vague that astronomers Still trying to solve the mystery why is that the light changes so dramatically.
WOH G64 is about three times the size of Betelgeuse, but 250 times farther away. As a result, it appears much smaller and dimmer to us than Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in Earth’s sky. Ohnaka and his colleagues have been studying behemoths for years, but they had to wait until technology was powerful enough to capture detailed portraits.
The technology takes the form of a device named GRAVITY, designed to observe very small and very dark objects. Considering how far away WOH G64 is, it certainly fits the bill of being small and dark. After the researchers made their observations in December 2020, they had to go through the painstaking process of cleaning, processing, and reconstructing the data to solve their goal.
So while the images may look blurry, the level of detail the researchers were able to obtain is incredible.
observation Photographed in 2005 and 2007 It became clear that WOH G64 was surrounded by dusty material. This is interesting because this star is in the red supergiant stage. It is the end of the life of a massive star that started out at about 8 to 35 times the mass of the Sun. When a star runs out of nuclear fuel to fuse at its center, it becomes unstable, burns up very hot, and swells to enormous size before exploding as a supernova.
This dusty material reveals that WOH G64 is at a highly unstable period in its life, undergoing severe mass loss towards the end.
Now, new observations reveal that the star is actually fading.
“We discovered that the star has undergone significant changes over the past 10 years, providing us with a rare opportunity to witness her life in real time.” says astronomer Gerd Weigert. Doctor of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.
Researchers believe the star’s dimming may be the result of mass loss. Gas and dust from a sneeze block some of the light from reaching us, making the star appear dimmer in a telescope.
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What surprised scientists was the oval-shaped ejecta bubble. Their modeling, based on previous observations, suggested that the shapes should be different. It is unclear why it took this shape, but there are several possible explanations.
It may have something to do with how the material is discharged. How it moves through space around a star. Or even the existence of unseen binary stars shaping the outflow in some way that scientists have not yet identified.
Behemoth represents entirely uncharted and exciting territory. The mass loss phase of red supergiants lasts for several thousand years. This means the star is on the brink. It could tell us things we’ve never seen before about how giant stars end their lives.
“This star is one of the most extreme of its kind.” says Jacco van Loon, an astronomer and director of the Kiel Observatory in the UK.“And dramatic changes could bring it closer to an explosive end.”
This research astronomy and astrophysics.
