Wolf Cukier, a junior at Scarsdale High School in New York, got a two-month internship with NASA during his junior year. So, he went to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland
His first task was to investigate fluctuations in star brightness acquired by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, as part of the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science initiative. (The citizen science initiative lets people who do not work for NASA to assist in the discovery of new planets.)
Cukier found a new planet only
three days into his internship. NASA made the announcement on their website, after validating the
teenager's work, submitting a paper co-authored by Cukier for scientific review, and announcing the
finding of the planet, now known as "TOI 1338 b," during the 235th
American Astronomical Society conference
17-year-old Cukier said: “I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars circle around each other, and from our view eclipse each other every orbit. About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338. At first, I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.
I noticed a dip, or a transit,
from the TOI 1338 system, and that was the first signal of a planet. I first
saw the initial dip and thought, ‘Oh that looked cool,’ but then when I looked at the
full data from the telescope at that star, I, and my mentor also noticed, three
different dips in the system.”
TOI 1338 b is 6.9 times the
size of Earth (between Neptune and Saturn) and is situated in the constellation
Pictor, approximately 1,300 light-years distant from Earth. TOI 1338 b is the
first circumbinary planet discovered by the TESS system, which means it circles
two stars. The two stars orbit each other every 15 days, and
one of them is 10% the size of the Sun. TOI 1338 b and its two stars form what
is known as an "eclipsing binary."
According to NASA, circumbinary
planets like TOI 1338 b are difficult to discover since standard algorithms
might misinterpret them for eclipses, which is why interns like Cukier are
crucial
After making history, the high
school senior is now considering his college options. Princeton, MIT, and
Stanford are his top three options.
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