Never seen before Researchers succeed in taking photo of star outside our galaxy

Scientific sensation: a researcher has taken a close-up photo of a dying star far from the Milky Way. This is an absolute first.

192,000 billion years: this figure is so absurdly high that it goes beyond the limits of any human imagination. But that's how long it would take an airplane to travel to WOH G64. Behind this seemingly cryptic number lies a star that is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud - in other words, outside the Milky Way.

And yet this celestial body, 160,000 light years away, is now making the headlines. The reason for this is nothing less than a scientific sensation. For the first time in the history of space exploration, a scientist has succeeded in taking a close-up picture of a star outside our own galaxy. It was taken by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in its "Very Large Telescope Interferometer" observatory in Chile.

The now historic image not only shows the huge celestial body - it is 2000 times the size of the sun - but also captures WOH G64 at a special moment. This is because the red supergiant currently resembles a glowing egg with a glowing sphere inside. Space enthusiasts will know: This constellation indicates that the star will soon die.

Researchers speculate about an "explosive end"

However, the euphoria of Keiichi Ohnaka, astrophysicist at the Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile and first author of the study in the journal "Astronomy and Astrophysics", could not be dampened by this fact: "We are excited because this could be related to the violent ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion."

Jacco van Loon, co-author of the study, adds according to Bild: "This star is one of the most extreme of its kind, and any drastic change can bring it closer to an explosive end."

Photograph resembles a technical masterpiece

At first glance, the successful photo of WOH G64 appears somewhat blurred. But even if it is not really sharp, the photo is a technical masterpiece. This was made possible by GRAVITY, a component of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the Paranal Observatory of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The technology crosses the light from several extremely sensitive telescopes and uses it to create a large image. Thanks to GRAVITY, the first direct observation of an exoplanet using optical interferometry was also successful in the past.