Scientists have found a trio of stars dancing a high-speed cosmic do-si-do.
In fact, the stars’ tempo is so rapid, astronomers have labeled this a new record: Here, a pair of stars orbit each other in less than two Earth days, while a third makes a trip around them in 25 days. Before this discovery, the fastest known three-star grouping was Lambda Tauri, with its farthest star circling in 33 days.
It took 68 years to beat the record holder. A NASA satellite, MIT researchers, artificial intelligence, and even a few amateur astronomers worked together to find the triplets, part of a system called TIC 290061484 in the constellation Cygnus.
“It’s exciting to identify a system like this because they’re rarely found,” said Saul Rappaport, a retired MIT astronomer, in a statement, “but they may be more common than current tallies suggest.”
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