Imagine 3 stars orbiting each other every 4 weeks. It is true.

Scientists have discovered three stars dancing the cosmic do-si-do at high speed.

In fact, the tempo of the stars is so fast, astronomers have written this new record: Here, two stars revolve around each other in less than two Earth days, while a third takes a trip around it in 25 days. Before this discovery, the most immediately known three-star group was Lambda Tauri, with the most distant star orbiting in 33 days.

It took 68 years to beat the record holder. A NASA satellite, MIT researchers, artificial intelligence, and even a few novice astronomers worked together to discover the triplets, which are part of a system called TIC 290061484 in the Cygnus constellation.

“It’s exciting to identify a system like this because it’s rare,” Saul Rappaport, an MIT astronomer, said in a statement, “but it may be more common than currently suggested.”

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

NASA’s TESS mission – short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite – looks closely for new worlds as they pass in front of their stars. But this unusual trio was discovered thanks to the “strobe lights” of the group. This system is almost flat from the vantage point of a space telescope, so that means that as the stars cross in front of them during their orbits, they create eclipses. Since a nearby star blocks the light of a distant star, it will cause flickering.

Novice astronomers looking for interesting conditions found eclipse patterns within the TESS data with the help of machine learning. These artists first met as participants in an online citizen science program called Planet Hunters. They later collaborated with astronomers to form the Visual Survey Group, a project that has been ongoing for more than a decade. The team’s paper detailing the unusually fast triplets was published in The Astrophysical Journal this week.

Three stars are larger than the sun, each from six to eight times its mass. Based on their configuration, the orbits of stars are thought to be stable for millions of years. But, as they grow, they will eventually merge, explode in a supernova and leave behind a neutron star, one of the densest objects in the universe. That probably won’t happen for another 20 to 40 million years.

So far the team knows of no planets orbiting these stars. If there isn’t one, it’s probably far away, orbiting the three as if they were one star. The triplets’ waltz in the sky is quite dense, taking place inside a ballroom smaller than Mercury’s orbit around the sun.

“No one lives here,” Rappaport said. “We think the stars formed together from the same growth process, which would have prevented planets from forming around any of the stars.”

Scientists say that more than half of all the stars in this galaxy have one or more stars associated with them. These solar systems can vary in detail. Some have larger hot stars paired with smaller cooler ones, or pairs where one star eats the other. The systems found range from two to seven stars.

The way these constellations revolve around each other can be very complex. In one six-star system, TYC 7037-89-1, three pairs orbit each other, but two of the three do not orbit each other. The third duo, in the main lane, surrounds the other two pairs.

Six star clusters have a very complex set of interconnected orbits.
Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center infographic

In the newly discovered program, there is another surprise. The stars are just cogs in a great machine. That’s right: There is another comparable star among this group, which makes a distant loop in more than 3,200 days.

The team wants to continue studying TIC 290061484 to gather more data on the fourth straggler star, as well as capture more information about the other stars’ orbits, masses, sizes, and temperatures. With more advanced observatories in the future, such as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope under development, studying other eclipsing star systems of even larger groups may become easier.

“Before scientists discovered the triple eclipse stars, we didn’t expect them to exist,” co-author Tamás Borkovits, a research scientist at the University of Szeged in Hungary, said in a statement. But when we got them, we thought, ‘Well, why?’