A red supergiant star has expelled the largest cloud of gas and dust ever seen in the process of being blown off one of these stellar behemoths. The vast size and intricacy of the cloud suggests that there could be a hidden group of stars that are contributing to the growth of the cloud.
In a false-color image taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the parts colored blue are expanding towards us, and the parts colored red are traveling in the opposite direction. The cloud stretches up to 1.4 light-years across, centered on the star, known as DFK 52. To give an idea how large it is, if DFK 52 were as far from us as another well-known supergiant is, the star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion the Hunter, somewhere between 550 and 700 light-years away, then the cloud around it would appear as large in the night sky as roughly one third of the full moon in the sky.
