
Every star ages, but astronomers rarely get to watch it happen in real time. Now, they've gotten a front-row seat to the aging of an unusually chaotic star — and found that it's headed toward a spectacularly violent death.
The star, located in the nearby Triangulum galaxy (also known as Messier 33), is in the middle of a transition into a class of highly unstable stars called Wolf-Rayet stars. New observations show that the star has begun beaming a new signal that was not seen when the star was first spotted in 2018.