Everything in the universe revolves. Planets and their satellites revolve around their axis and around rotating stars, which in turn revolve around the center of the galaxy. Like all stars, our Sun rotates on its axis.
If you track their movement, you will see that the solar equator makes one revolution in …
… 24.47 days, and the slower poles spend 26.24 days on it.
The sun is not a solid ball of stone - it is a sphere of hot plasma, so different regions can rotate at different speeds, but it rotates so slowly that it has the shape of an almost perfect sphere.
If you were at the “surface” of the Sun, which of course is impossible, then your speed would be about 7000 km / h. It seems very fast, but how fast is it compared to other stars? And which star is the fastest?
The star Achernar, the ninth brightest star in the sky, located 139 light years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, revolves much faster than our Sun. It is about 7 times more massive than the Sun, and makes one revolution around its axis in just 2 days. If you could see Achernar up close, it would look like a flattened ball. From pole to pole, this star would fit 7.6 suns, and almost 1.5 times more along the equator. Your speed at the equator of Achernar would reach 900,000 km / h.
But the fastest rotating star is VFTS 102, located about 160 thousand light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, it has a mass 25 times the mass of the Sun. On the “surface” of VFTS 102, your speed will be an astonishing 2 million km / h. In fact, the VFTS 102 is spinning so fast that it can barely hold its shape and if it accelerates a little more it will simply be torn apart. Thus, VFTS 102 rotates faster than any other star.
Another interesting feature of VFTS 102 is that it rushes through space much faster than neighboring stars. Astronomers suggest that VFTS 102 was in the past in a binary star system, but at some point in time, the second companion exploded like a supernova, throwing VFTS 102 into space at a tremendous speed.
Promotional video:
The neutron star as seen by the artist.
Do not forget about the so-called dead stars - neutron stars and black holes. The fastest neutron star ever discovered rotates 700 times per second. An ordinary star at this speed will be torn apart, but the gravitational forces of a neutron star are so great that they prevent this from happening. Black holes can spin even faster. In fact, when a black hole is in a binary system and actively engulfs its companion, it can rotate at almost the speed of light. Thus, black holes are right on the edge of the laws of physics that prohibit moving faster than the speed of light.