First close-up of a dying star outside the Milky Way

Recognizing individual stars in other galaxies has only been possible for a comparatively short time, which is why the nature of these “nebulae” in space has been puzzled for a long time. Although it had recently been suspected, it was only confirmed in the 1920s that galaxies, like our Milky Way, actually consist primarily of stars: in 1923, Edwin Hubble achieved this through observations with the world’s largest telescope (2.5 meter mirror), which had recently been built. , to discover Cepheid-class variable stars in the Andromeda Nebula, a galaxy over two million light-years away.