Scientists obtain image of a star on the precipice of disaster

WASHINGTON: Scientists have taken a close-up picture of a star apparently in its death throes, surrounded by gas and dust as it heads toward its demise in a huge explosion called a supernova - the first time the events of this pivotal stage have ever been imaged.

What makes this even more remarkable, according to the researchers, is that the observed star resides not in our Milky Way galaxy but in a neighboring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud.

It is the first zoomed-in image of a mature star in another galaxy, though a stellar newborn in the Large Magellanic Cloud was spotted in research published last year. Zoomed-in means the image captures the star and its immediate surroundings.

The dying star, named WOH G64, is located about 160,000 light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles.

The image, somewhat fuzzy, was obtained using the European Southern Observatory’s Chile-based Very Large Telescope Interferometer. It shows the star surrounded by a glowing egg-shaped cocoon of gas and dust - called a nebula - apparently ejected by the star. A faint oval ring beyond the cocoon, perhaps made of more dust, is also seen.

“The star is in the last stage of its life before a stellar demise,” said astronomer Keiichi Ohnaka of Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile, lead author of the study published on Thursday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.