Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2025

4 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2025 ASTRO PUBLISHING of our Sun, WOH G64 is classified as a red supergiant. Ohnaka’s team had long been inter- ested in this behemoth star. Back in 2005 and 2007, they used ESO’s VLTI in Chile’s Atacama Desert to learn more about the star’s features, and carried on studying it in the years since. But an actual image of the star had remained elusive. For the de- sired picture [see the video], the team had to wait for the develop- ment of one of the VLTI’s second- The first close-up picture of a star outside our galaxy “W e discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star,” says Ohnaka, the lead au- thor of a study reporting the obser- vations published in Astronomy & Astrophysics . “We are excited be- cause this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova ex- plosion.” While astronomers have taken about two dozen zoomed-in im- ages of stars in our galaxy, unveil- ing their properties, countless other stars dwell within other galaxies, so far away that observing even one of them in detail has been extremely challenging. Up until now. The newly imaged star, WOH G64, lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the small galaxies that orbits the Milky Way. Astronomers have known about this star for decades and have appropri- ately dubbed it the ‘behemoth star’. With a size roughly 2000 times that by ESO Bárbara Ferreira T his image shows an artist’s recon- struction of the star WOH G64, the first star outside our galaxy to be imaged in close-up. It is located at a staggering distance of over 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magel- lanic Cloud. This artistic impression showcases its main features: an egg- shaped cocoon of dust surrounding the star and a ring or torus of dust. The existence and shape of the latter require more observations to be con- firmed. [ESO/L. Calçada]