Stern zum ersten Mal im Detail außerhalb der Milchstraße abgebildet

Astronomer here! Really neat discovery!

To begin, we have imaged countless numbers of stars in other galaxies over the years- this is in fact how Edwin Hubble [discovered the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy](https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-views-the-star-that-changed-the-universe/) over a century ago (and what made him a famous enough astronomer to get the telescope named after him). So *that* in itself is by no means new. However, what we *have* not done before is image the innermost areas around a star outside our galaxy. This shouldn’t be shocking- stars visible from another galaxy are pretty darn bright ones, much more than any little bit of light reflected by material around the bright star would be, so if the star is at great distance you’re gonna have a tough time pulling this off.

Thankfully due to the progress of technology, some astronomers at ESO pulled this off using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in Chile. The star in question is called [WOH G64](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOH_G64) which is located in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud, ~160,000 light years from Earth (which sounds far, but astronomically speaking is as local as you can get but still be outside our galaxy!). It’s a star ~25x the mass of the sun, near the end of its life, and supermassive stars like this eject *huge* amounts of gas and dust near the ends of their lives- check out [Eta Carinae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae) in our own galaxy if you want a detailed picture of what this looks like. So in the case of WOH G64, we have resolved its surrounding “circumstellar material” (as it’s called) for the first time! Specifically, it looks like the dust and gas has 3-9x the mass of the sun- I wasn’t joking when I said stars like this eject a ton of mass before they die! [Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOH_G64#/media/File:WOH_G64_Particular.jpg) is a fantastic artist’s conception of what this system would look like.

So hey, it’s definitely amazing to see the things we can do these days! But this discovery is also important in terms of modeling these late stages of supermassive stars- this is a star massive enough to go supernova one day, a process we still have many questions about, so any details surrounding these stellar environments to tell us about their final days are really useful scientifically!