A magnified image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own has been captured by astronomers thanks to the impressive clarity provided by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) telescope. The research was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Photo of the WOH G64, wrapped in a large egg-shaped cocoon of dust. A fainter elliptical ring around it could be the inner rim of a dust ring, but more observations are needed to confirm this. An artist rendering of the star and surrounding structures has been added to the right.

While astronomers have taken magnified images of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, revealing their properties, there are countless other stars in other galaxies, but so far away that observing even one in detail has until now been extremely difficult.

The star WOH G64 is located 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy orbiting our own Milky Way. It was recorded ejecting gas and dust in the final stages before going supernova. Astronomers knew about this star and called it a “giant star” because it is about 2,000 times the size of our Sun. However, to get the desired image of it, they had to wait for the deployment of one of the VLTI’s second-generation instruments, GRAVITY. After comparing their new results with other previous observations of the star, they were surprised to find that the star had become less luminous over the past decade.

In the final stages of their lives, red supergiants like this star shed their outer layers of gas and dust in a process that can take thousands of years. These ejected materials may also be responsible for the dimness and the unexpected shape of a dust cocoon observed around the star. The researchers believe that the oval shape of the cocoon could be explained either by the ejection of material from the star or by the influence of an unknown companion star.