Close-up of a dying heavyweight

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Infrared image of the Large Magellanic Cloud our next neighbour galaxy at a distance of 160000 light years and the star WOH G64. Image: NASA Spitzer Satellite SAGE Team
Infrared image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, our next neighbour galaxy at a distance of 160,000 light years, and the star WOH G64. Image: NASA, Spitzer Satellite, SAGE Team

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn and European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching near Munich have for the first time taken a close-up of an individual dying supergiant star in our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. By combining two 8.2-m telescopes in Chile as an interferometer, they achieved the resolving power of a 60-m telescope.


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