[4][5][6] 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.

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 at University of California Santa Barbara.

In its theoretical model, the extreme rotational speed is caused by the transfer of material from a companion star in a binary system.

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.