The Fastest-Spinning Star in the Universe — VFTS 102

Right now, in the Tarantula Nebula of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a massive star is spinning at over 600 km/s at its equator. That is fast enough to cross the United States in seven seconds. VFTS 102 is the fastest-rotating non-compact star ever measured — a blue giant twenty-five times the mass of our Sun, spinning so violently that it is physically deformed, flinging material from its own surface into a glowing disc of ejected gas. It sits at roughly ninety percent of its critical rotation limit, the speed at which the star would begin tearing itself apart. But this star probably was not born this way. Its extreme rotation, its runaway velocity through the galaxy, and its proximity to a nearby supernova remnant and pulsar all point to a violent origin — a companion star that transferred mass onto VFTS 102 before exploding as a supernova, destroying the binary system and launching VFTS 102 through space like a cannonball. In this video, we explore what six hundred kilometers per second actually means, how astronomers measure stellar rotation from over 160,000 light-years away, what extreme rotation does to a star's shape, surface temperature, and internal chemistry, and why VFTS 102 may be one of the best candidates in the known universe for a future gamma-ray burst — the most energetic explosion physics allows. Sources: Dufton, P.L. et al. (2011). "The VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey: The fastest rotating O-type star and shortest period LMC pulsar — remnants of a supernova disrupted binary?" The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 743, L22. https://doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/743... Woosley, S.E. (1993). "Gamma-Ray Bursts from Stellar Mass Accretion Disks around Black Holes." The Astrophysical Journal, 405, 273. https://doi.org/10.1086/172359 Galama, T.J. et al. (1998). "An unusual supernova in the error box of the gamma-ray burst of 25 April 1998." Nature, 395, 670–672. https://doi.org/10.1038/27150 Maeder, A. & Meynet, G. (2000). "The Evolution of Rotating Stars." Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 38, 143–190. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.astro... Evans, C.J. et al. (2011). "The VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey: Introduction and observational overview." Astronomy & Astrophysics, 530, A108. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201... #VFTS102 #FastestSpinningStar #StellarPhysics #TarantulaNebula #GammaRayBurst #Astrophysics #SpaceScience