Astronomers have been observing WOH G64, a massive massive star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, for decades. WOH G64 is a galaxy visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere. This star is more than 1,500 times larger than the star solar Releases 100,000 times more energy. For a long time, red supergiant star WOH G64 appeared to be a star steadily growing in size and growing in size, shedding material as it began to run out of fuel.

No one had ever seen a known red supergiant star die, so astronomers didn’t think its final demise would happen soon. But in recent years, astronomers, including our team, South African Large Telescope (SALT) – We discovered that this star has begun to change, becoming dimmer and seemingly warmer than before. This has surprised scientists and suggests that the final stages of the star’s life may be more complex than once thought, and perhaps unfold more quickly.

Massive stars, about eight times more massive than the Sun, produce so much energy that we perceive as light that they run out of fuel within a few million years rather than the billions of years that the Sun lives.

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Most massive stars become massive, cold stars, so-called red supergiants, during the last million years or so of their lives. All red supergiants blow gaseous winds and lose weight as they do so. Some stars do this so strongly that they become enveloped in a shroud of ejected material that includes gas and solid particles like small grains of sand (called dust in astronomy). Therefore, although it appears dark in visible light, it appears very bright in infrared light, where the dust shines.

1960s, Swedish astronomers Westerlund, Ålander, Hedin discovered Their red star catalog number is 64. They thought nothing of it because it looked like an unremarkable red giant star. That’s what the Sun and most other stars will be in the future. However, in the 1980s, when NASA, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands launched infrared astronomical satellite Astronomers Elias, Flogel, and Schwering found that WOH G64 is the brightest, coolest, and dustiest red supergiant star in the entire Large Magellanic Cloud, which contains more than 1,000 red supergiants. Further observations over the next several decades showed the strong and stable fluctuations in brightness that would be expected for a pulsating star of this type.

And in 2024, our team (the authors of this article and collaborators from Germany and the United States) succeeded in taking close-up images of WOH G64 using the European Southern Observatory’s telescope, revealing a new dust cloud near the star. This was the clearest picture ever taken of a star in any other galaxy (comparable to being able to spot astronauts walking on the moon from Earth). Over the past decade, researchers have unexpectedly found that the star has started emitting far more dust than before. At the time, we had no idea why or how.

It turns out that WOH G64 also became darker, perhaps due to the ejected dust cloud, and began to pulsate smaller and a little faster, suggesting it was shrinking. At the same time, the star appeared much warmer, leading some to think it may have entered a new phase in its life, a yellow supergiant on its final path to so-called destruction.

All of these phenomena occur on human time scales, which is usually not the case when observing stars. This makes WOH G64 even more special. Does this star offer us an unmissable opportunity to witness the final death throes of a massive star?

Now that 2026 has begun, announced Observations obtained using south africa large telescope Can you give us a hint about what’s going on at WOH G64? SALT observations show a preponderance of ions near the star, meaning that the gas is being heated to high temperatures by what should be a much hotter star. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, since hot gases were discovered in the 1980s and have been discovered ever since. But we also found traces of molecules, suggesting that there is probably cold gas (because molecules break down at high temperatures) in the red supergiant’s atmosphere. It doesn’t seem to have turned into a yellow supergiant, at least not yet.

For a long time, astronomers have suspected that red supergiants have smaller, hotter twins living next door, but they have been somehow reluctant to claim this in print. And now it seems like the elephant in the room. One way to understand our observations is that this hotter star appears blue in contrast to its larger, cooler, red sibling, heating gas that it may have captured from the red supergiant’s wind. Now that the red supergiant star has disappeared, the presence of heated gas has become even more noticeable.