A team of astronomers has obtained the first detailed map of one of the most massive stars in the Milky Way that shed a ray of light on the final stages of a giant star's death.

Well, astronomers have created a detailed 3D map of VY Canis Majoris, a dying red hypergiant star located over 3,000 light-years from Earth. They found its way this rare supergiant star loses its mass is analogous to coronal arcs. Which are the loops of plasma that would erupt the sun itself. 

The extreme supergiant stars are known as hypergiants and are a very rare and few in numbers that would exist in the Milky Way. Such examples include Betelgeuse, the second brightest star in the constellation Orion, and then the NML Cygni and VY Canis Majoris are other examples of rare star types. The stars with lower masses are more likely to puff up once they enter the red giant phase but generally retain a spherical shape. The hypergiants tend to experience substantial, sporadic mass loss events that form complex, highly irregular structures composed of arcs, clumps, and knots. 

A team of astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, led by University of Arizona researchers Ambesh Singh and Lucy Ziurys. They have traced the directions and velocities of molecules as they swirled around VY Canis Majoris and mapped them across the different regions of the hypergiant's envelope in considerable detail to structure the ejected material that extends for billions of miles. 

'Think of it as Betelgeuse on steroids,' Ziurys said in one of his statements. 'It is much larger and much more massive, it even undergoes violent mass eruptions every 200 years or so.'

The team chose to study VY Canis Majoris because it offers a rare opportunity for astronomers to get understanding of the processes that occur when a tremendously large star reaches the end of its life cycle. Therefore, it is one of the best examples of these type of stars for astronomers to understand the mechanisms by which this star sheds mass.

'We are particularly interested in what hypergiant stars do during the end of their lives,' Singh said. 'People generally think that the massive stars get evolved into supernova explosions, but we are no longer sure about that.'

'We now think the hypergiant stars may quietly collapse into the black holes,' Ziurys said. 'But we don't know which ones would end their lives like that, or why that happens and how.'