Starlight from another galaxy

Snapping a close-up of a star beyond the sun is no easy task. In fact, astronomers have captured zoomed-in images of only about two dozen stars within the Milky Way. Now a group of scientists reports the first such image of a star in a neighboring galaxy (Astron. Astrophys. 2024, DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202451820).

The star, a red supergiant called WOH G64, resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years away. Astrophysicist Keiichi Ohnaka of Universidad Andrés Bello led the imaging effort, which combined long-wavelength light collected from four telescopes at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI).

Despite researching WOH G64 for almost 20 years, Ohnaka was surprised by the image. “The star itself is located in this orange, egg-shaped cocoon, which is actually the material ejected from the star,” he says. The shape of swirling gases, mostly hydrogen and helium, and silicate dust was unexpected, differing from Ohnaka’s past models.

Ohnaka’s team collected the data for this first image in 2020. Since then, WOH G64 has become too dim to photograph with VLTI, he says. But the telescope facility is expected to be upgraded soon. When it is, “we want to go back to the star,” Ohnaka says.