Teen discovers new planet while interning with NASA

Source: The Hill | January 10, 2020 | Marina Pitofsky

A New York teen who worked as an intern at NASA made a discovery last year while reviewing research data: a new planet. 

Wolf Cukier, 17, a former intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., was given the task last July of reviewing data on star brightness from the facility’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, ABC News reported.

Cukier, who is currently a senior at Scarsdale High School, was examining data from a system 1,300 light-years from Earth. He discovered darkness in one of the system’s suns, which was actually a planet nearly seven-times larger than Earth that orbited two stars.

“I had a lot of data in my notes that day about extremities in the binaries,” Cukier said of the discovery, which researchers call a circumbinary planet. “But when I saw this one, I put 10 asterisks next to it.”  

The discovery marks the first time the TESS program discovered a planet in the orbit of two different stars, ABC News reported. There are reportedly two suns in the solar system with the planet — one is 10 percent more massive than the Earth’s sun and the other is 30 percent of the sun’s mass, according to NASA. 

“The idea is we have a telescope that happened to be pointing at these stars, and the planet passed between those stars, and our telescope. And just like when the moon eclipses the sun, it creates a dimming of light from those stars. What we did was, I noticed that dimming and that was evidence that something was there, and it happened to be a planet,” he said. 

Cukier joked that the planet doesn’t have “an interesting name, just TOI1338B.”

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