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Astronomers have discovered an extraordinary binary system in which a "dead star," or white dwarf, whips around its blisteringly hot and tiny stellar companion so fast that it squeezes almost 72 years into just one Earth day. The system, designated TMTS J0526, was spotted by a Tsinghua University team using the Tsinghua University-Ma Huateng Telescope for Survey (TMTS) and is located around 2,760 light-years from Earth. TMTS J0526 contains a carbon- and oxygen-rich white dwarf star with a mass around 74% that of the sun's. It whips around a hot subdwarf star with a mass around a third of our star's, and is just around 7 times as wide as Earth, making it smaller than the gas giant planet Jupiter — and one of the smallest stars ever seen in terms of volume. The components of TMTS J0526 complete one orbit roughly every 20.5 minutes. This makes it a record-breaker for this type of binary, though the system is still a slouch...

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (or DESI for short) has created the largest 3D map of the universe we’ve ever seen. DESI created the map over the course of seven months. Each month, DESI continues to build off of it. In fact, DESI is only 10 percent of the way through its proposed five-year mission. When the map is completed, it will give us a deeper look into the universe and its depth. According to  Science Alert, DESI has already managed to catalog more than 7.5 million galaxies. Additionally, it will continue adding a million new galaxies each month. When the scan finally completes in 2026, we’ll have data on more than 35 million galaxies in space. That should provide astronomers with a huge map of the universe to study and dig into. The main objective of DESI is to reveal more about the dark energy found throughout the universe. Dark energy makes up around 70 percent of the universe, and it plays a big part in speeding up its expansion. Carlos Frenk, a cosmo...