If she was at the center of the solar system, she would be able to engulf Jupiter.
We love to watch them sparkle in the sky after dark. The stars are bright and shiny gas balls mainly composed of hydrogen and helium, defines NASA. Our galaxy has billions, more or less large, more or less far. The biggest stars we know are the “red supergees”, extremely bright gigantic stars. One of them is particularly interested in astronomers because it is one of the greatest stars in the universe and it is at the end of life.
Rightly nicknamed “the colossal star” by scientists, it is about 2,000 the sun’s department, more than a billion kilometers. It is the largest star in the Grand Cloud in Magellan, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located at an astounding distance of 160,000 light years from us. If it was placed in the center of the solar system, it would be able to engulf the orbit of Jupiter (our largest planet).
Followed since 1981, this extragalactic star known as “Woh G64” (for “Westerlund+Olandnder+Hedin”, the names of the astronomers who discovered it, and “G” for “Giant”) has just been photographed for the first time by astrophysicists with the Very wide telescope interferomer, A set of 4 telescopes of the European Austral Observatory (ESO) located in the Atacama desert in Chile. An unprecedented and historical cliché in view of the difficulty in zooming at such a distance. The photo below shows that the star is wrapped in a large cocoon of dust and gas in the shape of an egg, a sign of an imbalance between its gravity and the energy of its fusion and therefore of a future explosion in “supernova”, marking the end of its life.
“”We found that the star has undergone a significant change in the past ten years, which gives us a rare opportunity to attend the life of a real -time star“Explains Gerd Weiglt, professor of astronomy at the Max Planck Institute in Radioastronomy in Bonn, Germany, and co -author of the study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. This star is one of the most extreme of its kind, and any radical change can bring it closer to an explosive end“.
In addition, these researchers were surprised to see that the star had darkened in the space of 10 years. And as a star becomes less bright, it becomes more and more difficult to take close -up photos, even with this super telescope. There was therefore an “emergency” to photograph her in the last stages of her life.
