17-year-old discovers new planet on his third day of internship at NASA
Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old NASA intern, discovered the existence of a new planet on the third day of his internship. The teen’s discovery has helped NASA to recognize and collect more information about the new planet.
Cukier, a high school student from Scarsdale, New York, was testing images from NASA’s super power satellite when he saw something that was later confirmed by NASA as a new planet, 1,300 light years away from the planet Earth.
“I was searching for a planet that orbits two stars,” Said Wolf.
Source: BBC
As an intern, Cukier’s work was to search for adjustments in the brightness of any star that might indicate the shadow of a planet moving through the front. Three days later, he found something blocking the light of two stars and flagged it.
“I took it to my mentor, we looked at the data from the stars and noticed two additional dips in light, so we started doing analysis to see if it actually could be a planet.”
Source: BBC
The latest discovered planet, now called TOI 1338b, is said to be seven times larger than our planet Earth and has two stars –one that is 10% larger than the Sun, and the other is just one third of the Sun’s mass and has less light.
