Teen Discovers New Planet While Interning At NASA
17-year-old Wolf Cukier from Scarsdale, New York, was on his third day helping out at a Nasa program when he found something incredible: a new planet with two stars 1,300 light-years from Earth away in the constellation Pictor.
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Cukier was assigned to study how two stars would cross paths creating an eclipse. His main focus was on the solar system TOI 1338, where he noticed something in the orbit of two stars that were blocking the light. For several weeks, his bosses tried to verify his observation, and ultimately concluded that Cukier had actually discovered a planet; 6.9 times larger than Earth and only the 13th planet of its kind ever discovered.
“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,” Cukier said, according to a Nasa press release. He went on to say, “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.”
Cukier also told CBS: “The planet blocked the light from those two stars, leading to a small dip in the amount of light that reached the telescope. That’s what I noticed at first. It was like, oh … there’s something here that was cool. But it’s also not like there’s a single moment of discovery,” Cukier said.
In a paper co-authored by Cukier along with established scientists has been submitted to a scientific journal, Nasa said.
“TOI 1338 b’s transits are irregular, between every 93 and 95 days, and vary in depth and duration thanks to the orbital motion of its stars. Tess only sees the transits crossing the larger star – the transits of the smaller star are too faint to detect. Its orbit is stable for at least the next 10m years. The orbit’s angle to us, however, changes enough that the planet transit will cease after November 2023 and resume eight years later.”
“Our confidence went up and down a couple of times, but by the end of the internship, we were confident that what we found was a planet,” Cukier told ABC News about his and his team’s excited investigations.
Cukier says he hopes this is the beginning of a career in the field.
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