Imagine 3 stars orbiting each other every 4 weeks. It’s real. [Video]

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.”

You can watch the stars’ unique orbit in the video below:

NASA’s TESS mission — short for Transiting …