A New York teenager has discovered a whole new planet while interning for NASA, and it's 6.9 times bigger than Earth and orbits two suns.
In the latest chapter of “The Kids Are Alright,” a teenager from New York has literally discovered an entire planet while interning for NASA. The high school senior was looking for a foreign system while observing outer space, and boy did he find one.
Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old intern for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, was given the job of combing through data on star brightness. While doing just that through the facility’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission , he found a slight darkness in one of the foreign system’s suns located 1,300 light-years from Earth.
That darkness Cukier observed ended up being a planet that is 6.9 times larger than Earth and orbits two stars — scientists call that a “circumbinary planet.” “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 in a press release from
. “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.”
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