High school student discovered a new planet after three days of internship at NASA

A New York high school student can add this item to his resume: “Discovering a planet during an internship at NASA,” writes People.

Фото: Depositphotos

Wolfe Cukier worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland last summer, where he discovered TOI 1338 b, a planet orbiting two stars instead of one. This was found out by studying the information obtained using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

“I was looking at data on everything that the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsed binary system, in which two stars orbit each other and eclipse each other in each orbit,” said 17-year-old Cukier.

“About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338,” he added.

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He continued: “At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but it did not coincide in time. It turned out to be a planet. ”

According to NASA, TOI 1338 b is the first near-Earth planet discovered by TESS. The planet is about 6,9 times larger than Earth—almost the size of Saturn. It is located in a system 1300 light years away in the constellation Pictor.

NASA says the planet orbits two stars every 95 days. One star is about 10 percent larger than our Sun, and the second is cooler and fainter, making up only a third of the mass of our Sun.

The agency reported that Kukye’s planetary finds were presented in a panel discussion at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, and an article was co-authored with a high school student in a scientific journal.

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A teenager who just finished school year at Scarsdale High School when he made this discovery compared TOI 1338 b with the fictional planet Tatooine.

“I discovered a planet with two stars revolving around it. When you think about Luke's home world, Tatooine from " Star Wars, it’s like this: in every sunset there will be two stars,” he said.

Although the teenager is credited with the discovery, Kukye said that he could not name the planet because "the planets discovered by TESS receive a TOI number if they do not already have another meaningful name."

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