Wolf Cukier, 17, a senior at Scarsdale High School in New York, set out to be a summer intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and it took him just three days to discover a new planet.
Cukier made the most of his internship at NASA after being assigned to monitor variations in the brightness of stars that had been recorded by the space program’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
About three days after my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338. At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing wasn’t right. It turned out to be a planet.
– Wolf Cukier, for CBS New York/YouTube
To his surprise, while surveying a solar system 1,300 light-years away in the constellation of Pictor, he found a planet after noticing something blocking the light from two stars.
The young man’s finding was significant enough to require further analysis by the NASA team of scientists, since this is not just any planet, but a circumbinary one. This means that the planet orbits around two stars and not one, as most do.
I took it to my mentor, we looked at the star data and noticed two additional dips in light, so we started doing an analysis to see if it could actually be a planet.
The planet, known as TOI 1338 b, has two stars that orbit each other every 15 days. One is about ten percent larger than our sun, while the other is cooler, dimmer, and only a third the size of the star.
The discovery represents the first circumbinary planet from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. According to Cukier, it was the first time he had worked with this device.
Sci-fi fans noted that the planet is like Tatooine, where Luke Skywalker is from in the saga. StarWars. In fact, Cukier is also a huge fan of the movies, which doubles the excitement of helping out with this fantasy discovery. fandom.
It’s a lot like Tatooine, at least how the stars would look in the sky. So, it would also have a double sunset.
The planet is the only one within the TOI 1338 system. It is approximately 6.9 times the size of Earth, with dimensions similar to those of Neptune and Saturn. However, Cukier explains that it is likely to be extremely hot without a solid surface, which would make it uninhabitable.
Computer-generated images of TOI 1338 b reveal that scientists predict it to have a pinkish hue with pleasing swirling purple, blue, and green weather systems. NASA uploaded an educational video to its YouTube channel detailing the discovery of the new planet.
Unsurprisingly, the internet went wild over TOI 1338 by sharing some of its similarities to Earth. A Twitter user posted an image of the music video Two Ghosts, by Harry Styles, alluding to the similarity of colors on the planet.
That’s where Harry shot the footage for ‘Two Ghosts’.
Cukier, whose family wanted the planet to be called “Wofftopia”, revealed that he plans to go to college to pursue space research at NASA.
When I’m there, I plan to study physics and astrophysics. From there, a career in space research seems attractive to me.
According to NASA, TESS is expected to “observe hundreds of thousands of eclipsing binaries during its initial two-year mission, so many more of these circumbinary planets should be waiting to be discovered.”