The exoplanet was located by a 17-year-old boy just three days after his internship at NASA
Have you ever worked as an intern? If so, you may know how hectic work can be. Maybe you end up doing all the tasks no one wanted to do, or you make coffee and sort through boxes full of documents.
But the same cannot be said for Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old NASA intern from New York. Just three days after starting work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt in 2019, this teenager discovered something amazing. He managed to find a completely new exoplanet located at a distance of 1,300 light-years from Earth. The planet was named TOI 1338b.
In an interview with CNN, Wolf said he was eagerly awaiting the details the volunteers asked of him. “Three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338b. At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing wasn’t right. It turned out to be a planet,” explains the intern.
The interesting thing is that the planet orbits two stars, so it is circumbinary. “One of the stars is about 10% more massive than our Sun, while the other is cooler, dimmer and only a third of the mass of the Sun,” according to NASA’s Goddard Center. The new planet is about seven times larger than Earth.
Although there are no telescopes that can clearly capture objects at such a distance. Recently, images of TOI 1388b were released, which are truly fascinating and were created using artificial intelligence from the known data of this planet. The stunning images of the planet racked up more than 1.2 million likes and 224,000 retweets within just a few days.
Image credit: NASA Goddard Center, paintwater_boba