AB8 was first discovered by Lindsay in 1961, when it was catalogued as entry 547 in a list of emission line objects in the SMC. Sanduleak listed it as a confirmed member of the SMC, gave a spectral type of WR + OB, and identified it as one of only five stars that were not nuclei of planetary nebulae, but showed OVI emission in their spectra. These would later be formally grouped as the WO class, the oxygen sequence of Wolf-Rayet stars.
