A duo of astronomers, Dr. Youichi Ohyama (Institute of
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica or ASIAA, Taiwan) and Dr. Ananda
Hota (UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in the Basic Sciences or CBS, India), has
discovered a Blue Supergiant star located far beyond our Milky Way Galaxy in
the constellation Virgo (Figure). Over fifty-five million years ago, it emerged
in an extremely wild environment, surrounded by intensely hot plasma (a million
degrees centigrade) and amidst raging cyclone winds blowing at four-million
kilometers per hour. Research using the Subaru Telescope, the
Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope (CFHT) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's
(NASA) Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) revealed unprecedented views of the
star formation process in this intergalactic context and showed the promise of
future investigations of a possibly new mode of star formation, unlike that
within our Milky Way.