I need to look away from this present Wag the Dog moment, for a bit — and may not mention it again, unless US- or Israeli- troops are killed in large numbers. But that does not mean I approve. [There is a need to corral the oppressive regime in Iran, and the leaders’ nuclear ambitions — but this is not the way, in my estimation.]

So to better (still evolving) narratives — off some 163,000 light-years, into the night skies — in the Large Magellanic Cloud — sits a supermassive red to yellow binary, that is “spagettifying” its companion blue dwarf. That added energy may be its undoing, as it is now possible that it super-novas” on a non-geological time scale (i.e., potentially, before our very eyes/telescopes). Here’s that fascinating story — and a bit, out of Athens, Greece:

…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.

However, in 2014, the appearance of this supergiant began to change. A team of astronomers, led by Gonzalo Muñoz-Sanchez at the National Observatory of Athens, noticed the star’s color changing along with a corresponding increase in its surface temperature. Muñoz-Sanchez and colleagues determined this must represent the transformation of a red supergiant into a rare yellow hypergiant, which could also mean astronomers are witnessing a star “die” in real time….

“The fate of stars with initial masses between 23 and 30 solar masses after evolving into red supergiants is still uncertain. In this case, WOH G64 was the most extreme red supergiant known, with an estimated mass of around 28 solar masses,” Muñoz-Sanchez told Space.com. “It remains unclear whether such stars explode as supernovas, collapse directly into black holes, or evolve from the red supergiant phase into a yellow hypergiant stage before ending their lives. “WOH G64 might be the solution to this question….”

Super-nova, next? We shall — as ever — see. Onward, resolutely.

नमस्ते