ESO's Very Large Telescope has spotted the fastest rotating star known to date, rotating at more than two million kilometers per hour, more than three hundred times faster than the Sun.

The VFTS 102 is a brilliant star found in the Tarantula Nebula, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is about 160,000 light-years from Earth.

According to an international team of astronomers using the ESO's VLT, the star which is around 25 times the mass of the Sun and about one100,000 times brighter, was moving through space at a different speed from its neighbors.

"The remarkable rotation speed and the unusual motion compared to the surrounding stars led us to wonder if this star had had an unusual early life. We were suspicious." said Philip Dufton, lead author of the study.

Scientists said the difference in speed could mean that VFTS 102 is a runaway star that has been ejected from a double star system after its companion exploded as a supernova. Two further clues, a pulsar and an associated supernova remnant in its vicinity, support this idea.

The research team said this unusual star could have started as one component of a binary star system. As such, gas from the companion could have streamed over and in the process the star would have spun faster and faster. After about ten million years, the massive companion would have exploded as a supernova and the explosion could have led to the ejection of the star. This explains the difference between its speed and that of other stars in the region.

When it collapsed, the massive companion turned into the pulsar that is observed today, the researchers said.