Resolving the dusty torus and the mystery surrounding LMC red supergiant WOH G64

We present mid-IR long-baseline interferometric observations of the red supergiant WOH G64 in the Large Magellanic Cloud with MIDI at the ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). Our MIDI observations of WOH G64 are the first VLTI observations to spatially resolve an individual stellar source in an extragalactic system. Our 2-D radiative transfer modeling reveals the presence of a geometrically and optically thick torus seen nearly pole-on. This model brings WOH G64 in much better agreement with the current evolutionary tracks for a 25 M_⊙ star — about a half of the previous estimate of 40 M_⊙ — and solves the serious discrepancy between theory and observation which existed for this object.