This is a star spinning at 2 million kilometers per hour – so fast, it has made itself into its own twirling skirt, its own hula hoop, its own dervish robe.
As the European Space Agency says:
Centrifugal force from this dizzying spin rate has flattened the star into an oblate shape, and spun off a disk of hot plasma, seen edge on in this view from a hypothetical planet. The star may have “spun up” by accreting material from a binary companion star. The rapidly evolving companion later exploded as a supernova. The whirling star lies 160 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.