Astronomers have captured most detailed images ever ofred hypergiant starVY Canis Majoris in the constellation Canis Major by using Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). After examining them, they found that dust particles around the star caused it to lose huge amount of mass.

It is the first time when astronomers have succeeded in understanding why one of the largest stars in the Milky Way has started dying.VY Canis Majoris is about 4,892 light years from earth. The star is about 300,000 times more luminous than the sun.

The new observations were made by the astronomers withSPHERE instrument on the VLT. The adaptive optics system of the instrument corrects pictures to a higher degree than earlier adaptive optics. The SPHERE instrument allowed astronomers to see how the star is illuminating its surroundings.

As per experts, giant stars shedlarge amounts of material every year.VY Canis Majoris expelsmaterial about 30 times the mass of our home planet. Scientists still don’t know how material in giant stars’upper atmospheres is released away into space before the star’s explosion. It has been assumed thatradiation pressure is behind the process.

Peter Scicluna, a researcher from Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and lead author of new research, said giant stars always have a short life. When the stars reach final days of their life, they start losing lots of mass, said Scicluna.

Scicluna said, “Previously, we could only theorize how this happened. Now, with the new SPHERE data, we have found large grains of dust around this hypergiant. These are big enough to be pushed away by the star's intense radiation pressure, which explains the star's rapid mass loss”.