VFTS 102 is a star located in the

Tarantula nebula The Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus) is a large H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), forming its south-east corner (from Earth's perspective). Discovery The Tarantula Nebula was observed by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille durin ...

, a star forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the

Milky Way The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. ...

. The peculiarity of this star is its projected equatorial velocity of ~ (about ), making it the second fastest rotating massive star known alongside VFTS 285 (), and preceded only by the WO star

WR 142 WR 142 is a Wolf-Rayet star in the constellation Cygnus, an extremely rare star on the WO oxygen sequence. It is a luminous and very hot star, highly evolved and close to exploding as a supernova. It is suspected to be a binary star wi ...

which has a rotational velocity of . The resulting centripetal force tends to flatten the star; material can be lost in the loosely bound equatorial regions, allowing for the formation of a disk. The spectroscopic observations seem to confirm this, and the star is classified as Oe, possibly due to emission from such an equatorial disk of gas. This star was observed by the VLT Flames Tarantula Survey collaboration using the VLT,

Very Large Telescope The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is a telescope facility operated by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It consists of four individual telescopes, each with a primary mirror 8.2 m acro ...

in Chile. One member of this team is Matteo Cantiello, an Italian astrophysicist who emigrated to the United States and is currently working at the

Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) is a research institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara. KITP is one of the most renowned institutes for theoretical physics in the world, and brings theorists in physics and rela ...

University of California Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the Un ...

. In 2007, together with a few collaborators, he predicted the existence of massive stars with properties very similar to VFTS 102. In its theoretical model, the extreme rotational speed is caused by the transfer of material from a companion star in a binary system. After this "cosmic dance", the donor star is predicted to explode as a supernova. The spun-up companion instead is likely to be launched out of the orbit and move away from its stellar neighbors at high speed. Such a star is called a runaway. VFTS 102 fits this theoretical model very well, being found to be a rapidly rotating runaway star and lying close to a pulsar and a supernova remnant. Other scenarios, like a dynamical ejection from the core of the star cluster R136, are also possible.

References

External links

ESO Press Release

STScI Press Release

News on "Corriere della Sera"

News on "Il Tirreno"

Press Release at University of California Santa Barbara

VLT Flames Tarantuala Survey Homepage

Matteo Cantiello HomePage
{{DEFAULTSORT:VFTS 102 O-type main-sequence stars Emission-line stars Runaway stars Tarantula Nebula Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud Extragalactic stars Dorado (constellation) J05373924-6909510