By DPA,
Garching (Germany) : Scientists in Germany who devised a way to hook up two powerful telescopes in stereo have observed for the first time the details of a star outside our Milky Way galaxy.
They trained the two telescopes on a red supergiant named WOH G64 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbouring galaxy. WOH is about 2,000 times larger than the sun and is 163,000 light years away.
Keiichi Ohnaka of the Max Planck Radio-Astronomy Institute in Bonn led the research, which is described in a new science article Tuesday.
He and his team worked with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, a suburb of Munich, remotely using the ESO telescope complex, which is built on a desert mountain in Chile.
They used two eight-metre reflector scopes to create a virtual 60-metre telescope.
The observations show the ageing star blowing much of its substance into space. It has lost 40 percent of its original mass already, developing a shroud of dust around it. An explosion as a supernova is inevitable.
The article appears in Astronomy & Astrophysics.