High School Student Discovers New Planet During NASA Internship

A high school student found a distant exoplanet that orbits two stars on the 3rd day of his internship at NASA. Wolf Cukier made his discovery last summer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland during his first assignment.

Cukier was using NASA's alien-hunting space telescope TESS when he noticed the planet orbiting a pair of stars more than 1,300 light-years from Earth, which had been named TOI 1338b.

TOI 1338b is NASA's first binary planet discovery. It is almost seven times larger than the Earth - somewhere between the size of Saturn and Neptune.

The goal of TESS is to hunt for planets outside of the Earth's solar system.

Cukier was checking out information for whatever the volunteers had flagged as an overshadowing binary. He first thought it was a stellar eclipse, but it turned out to be a planet.

TOI 1338 is a gas planet that orbits 2 celebrities that have to do with 1,300 light-years far from our sunlight in the constellation Pictor.

The exoplanet is TESS's first world that orbits two stars.

According to NASA, circumbinary planets such as the one Cukier found are not new, but they are rare.

The discovered planet lies in the Pictor constellation and the lone planet orbits the pair of stars every 93 to 95 days.

Being a die-hard Star Wars fan, Cukier said that the planet is somewhat like one from the fictional sci-fi series. He said he discovered a planet with two stars which it orbits around, much like Luke's homeworld, Tatooine, from Star Wars.

The planet is the only planet in the TOI 1338 system and is unlikely to be livable.

One star is about 10 percent bigger than our Sun, while the other star is cooler, dimmer and only one-third the Sun's mass.

TESS seeks for dips in the brightness of stars. A star growing dim could result from an exoplanet passing between the star and the instrument. It takes a photograph of a single patch of sky every 30 minutes over 27 days. Then these are queued to the TESS citizen science website where people can flag possible planet candidates.

However, information from Cukier's system doesn't show periodic patterns, making it more complicated for TESS algorithms to understand.

The two stars do not have similar sizes - the larger one is 10% bigger than our sun while the other is a dimmer red dwarf. Thus, blips in the sun-size star's brightness could have been caused by the dwarf star passing in front of it.

Cukier was tasked with aesthetically analyzing prospective transportations in the TESS information, as well as understood that when it involved TOI 1338 b's excellent moms and dads, the timing was incorrect for the illumination dips to be triggered by the smaller-sized celebrity coming on front of the larger celebrity.

TESS will study TOI 1338 b just up until November 2023, when the tilt of its orbit around the celebrities stops it from obstructing their light.