Milky Way is about 100k LY in diameter, and this thing is 160k LY away, so it's not just closer to our particular neck of the woods than farther reaches of our own galaxy.
The picture is not if the star disk, but apparently of the huge dust cloud lit by a star in the middleof it.
Not a lot of information, just the photo and a paragraph blurb beneath it.
What I'm wondering is why the alleged "first" picture of this kind is of a star 160,000 light years away. There are hundreds of millions of stars in that distance range from us. I suppose there may be a reasonable explanation having to do with optimal visibility or something, but my intuition is completely failing here.
- "The bright oval at the centre of this image is a dusty cocoon that enshrouds the star."
So, this isn't actually the emitting surface (photosphere) of the star, but a dust cloud about 10,000x larger than the star.
the article in astronomy and astrophysics https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/11/aa51820-...
FWIW, for some context of “160,000 light-years away”, you can see pictures — taken by all levels of “backyard astronomers” — of the Large Magellanic Cloud (where WOH G64 is located) on AstroBin.
http://app.astrobin.com/search?p=eJy7mVCSWlFiq2rupGpkVJaYU5o...
What would the Milky Way look like on a planet in the Large Magellanic Cloud?
Over that way lies Mordor, under the all-seeing gaze of Sauron.
I had a skim through the article in astronomy and astrophysics and I saw this
> The ring’s appearance in the images reconstructed with different algorithms (MiRA and IRBis) lends support to it being real. However, as Fig. E.2 shows, the location of the ring is just inside the side lobe of the dirty beam, and therefore we cannot entirely exclude the possibility that it might be an artifact of the image reconstruction inherent in the imperfect uv coverage. We refrain from further discussing this structure until we can confirm it with better uv coverage.
Which is interesting. So the ring may be an artifact.