How fast can a star spin? Our sun rotates at a leisurely 2 kilometers per second, but now astronomers have discovered that a star in another galaxy spins 300 times faster—with a record-breaking speed of 600 kilometers per second. At that velocity, an airplane could circle Earth in little more than a minute. The star, named VFTS 102, is hot, blue, and young, residing in the Tarantula Nebula, a huge star-forming cloud of gas and dust 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the brightest galaxy that orbits our own


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