Astronomers have witnessed one of our universe's biggest stars transforming into a rare stellar body, and the dramatic metamorphosis may be the prequel to a powerful supernova explosion that sees this star birth a black hole.
The doomed star in question is WOH G64 (also known as IRAS 04553–6825), located in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), around 163,000 light-years away. The star is around 1,540 times the size of the sun, with almost 30 times the mass of our star and a staggering 282,000 times its brightness. Discovered in the 1970s, WOH G64 has always appeared to be a red supergiant star surrounded by a ring, or torus, of dense dust.
