First up-close picture taken of star outside Milky Way

Astronomers have taken a close-up photo of a star outside our own galaxy, the Milky Way, for the first time, the European Southern Observatory announced in a statement Thursday.

The star -- WOH G64 -- is 160,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits the Milky Way, according to the observatory.

The star is about 2,000 times larger than our sun and is classified as a red supergiant. The star is puffing out gas and dust, in the last stages before it becomes a supernova, according to the observatory.

“We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star," Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile and co-author of the study, said in a statement. "We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion."

Astronomers have known about the star for "decades" and have called it the "behemoth star," according to the observatory.

"We have found that the star has been experiencing a significant change in the last 10 years, providing us with a rare opportunity to witness a star’s life in real time," said Gerd Weigelt, an astronomy professor at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and co-author of the study.

In their final life stages, red supergiants like WOH G64 shed their outer layers of gas and dust in a process that can last thousands of years.

"This star is one of the most extreme of its kind, and any drastic change may bring it closer to an explosive end," said Jacco van Loon, a co-author in the study and Keele Observatory director at Keele University, who has been observing WOH G64 since the 1990s.