| Title | Beyond the Milky Way | |
| Date | Tuesday November 26, @12:44AM | |
| Author | hubie | |
| Topic | ||
| from the big-red-star dept. | ||
Beyond the Milky Way
A picture have been taken, or however they do it -- it's quite blurry, of a red supergiant star 2000x larger then our own sun. Designated as WOH G64 it is about 160 000 light-years from earth. It is located inside the Large Megallanic cloud, a small galaxy just outside the milky way.
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/close-picture-star-milky/story?id=116129095
"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," said Gerd Weigelt, an astronomy professor at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and co-author of the study.
[...] "This star is one of the most extreme of its kind, and any drastic change may bring it closer to an explosive end," said Jacco van Loon, a co-author in the study and Keele Observatory director at Keele University, who has been observing WOH G64 since the 1990s.
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2417/
"For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way," says Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile. Located a staggering 160 000 light-years from us, the star WOH G64 was imaged thanks to the impressive sharpness offered by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO's VLTI). The new observations reveal a star puffing out gas and dust, in the last stages before it becomes a supernova.
"We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star," says Ohnaka, the lead author of a study reporting the observations published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. "We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion."
[...] The team thinks that these shed materials may also be responsible for the dimming and for the unexpected shape of the dust cocoon around the star. The new image shows that the cocoon is stretched-out, which surprised scientists, who expected a different shape based on previous observations and computer models. The team believes that the cocoon's egg-like shape could be explained by either the star's shedding or by the influence of a yet-undiscovered companion star.
As the star becomes fainter, taking other close-up pictures of it is becoming increasingly difficult, even for the VLTI. Nonetheless, planned updates to the telescope's instrumentation, such as the future GRAVITY+, promise to change this soon. "Similar follow-up observations with ESO instruments will be important for understanding what is going on in the star," concludes Ohnaka.
https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso2417/eso2417a.pdf
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printed from SoylentNews, Beyond the Milky Way on 2025-01-14 12:08:59