Scientists said Thursday they have taken the first-ever close-up image of a star outside of the Milky Way, capturing a blurry shot of a dying behemoth 2,000 times bigger than the Sun.

Roughly 160,000 light years from Earth, the star WOH G64 sits in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our home Milky Way.

It is a red supergiant, which is the largest type of star in the universe because it expands into space as it nears its explosive death.

The image was captured by a team of researchers using a new instrument of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

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Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist at Chile's Andres Bello National University, said that "for the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star."

The image shows the bright, if somewhat blurry, yellow star enclosed inside an oval outline.

"We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star," Ohnaka 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," added the lead author of a study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.