For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way, Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist from Andres Bello National University in Chile, said.
WOH G64, once thought to be cool and dim, is actually the most luminous red supergiant star in that galaxy, a behemoth at least 2,000 times bigger than the sun.
When such big stars finally run out of the thermonuclear fuel that keeps their inner fires burning, their cores collapse.
Some particularly massive stars vanish without further ado into black holes. But others rebound and explode as supernovas, spewing newly created elements into space.
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