Fastest spinning star ever discovered rotates 100 times faster than sun

Astronomers announced that they have found the fastest spinning star ever discovered. The hot blue giant rotates at a dizzying 1 million miles per hour, or 100 times faster than our sun does. The star might rip apart apart due to centrifugal forces if it spun any faster.

The massive, bright young star, called VFTS 102, lies in a neighboring dwarf galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers think that it may have had a violent past and has been ejected from a double star system by its exploding companion.

An international team of astronomers discovered the star using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The astronomers also found that the star, which is around 25 times the mass of the sun and about one hundred thousand times brighter, was moving through space at a significantly different speed from its neighbors.

Philip Dufton of Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, is lead author of the paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters presenting the results. He said:

The remarkable rotation speed and the unusual motion compared to the surrounding stars led us to wonder if this star had an unusual early life. It was suspicious.

This difference in speed could imply that VFTS 102 is a runaway star — a star that has been ejected from a double star system after its companion exploded as a supernova. Two further clues support this idea: a pulsar and supernova remnant in its vicinity.

The team suggests that the star could have started life as one component of a binary star system. If the two stars were close, gas from the companion streaming over could cause the star to have spun faster and faster. This would explain one unusual fact — why it is rotating so fast. After a short life of about ten million years, the massive companion would have exploded as a supernova, which could explain the supernova remnant found nearby.

The explosion would have led to the ejection of the star and could explain the third anomaly — the difference between its speed and that of other stars in the region. As it collapsed, the massive companion would then have turned into the pulsar that is observed today and completed the solution to the puzzle.

Although the astronomers aren’t yet sure that this is exactly what happened, Dufton concluded:

This is a compelling story because it explains each of the unusual features that we’ve seen. This star is certainly showing us unexpected sides of the short but dramatic lives of the heaviest stars.

To test this theory, Lennon and de Mink will use NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to make precise measurements of the star’s proper motion across space.

Bottom line: An international team of astronomers have found the fastest spinning star ever discovered. The star, called VFTS 102, rotates at a dizzying 1 million miles per hour, or 100 times faster than our sun.

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