If you peered through a powerful telescope at the Tarantula nebula, a star forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, you might see a star spinning faster than a merry-go-round on rocket fuel. Introducing VFTS 102, the second fastest star ever discovered.

First spotted by astronomers through the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, VFTS 102 is about 160,000 light-years from Earth and spins at a dizzying pace of roughly 2 million km/h. The star's zippy spin tends to flatten it out, even allowing material to escape at its sides and form a disk. According to the experts,  VFTS 102  may have had a violent past and has been ejected from a double star system by its exploding companion.