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January 11, 2020 04:34 pm

17-Year-Old Discovers a New Planet On the Third Day of His NASA Internship

17-year-old Wolf Cukier made a big discovery on the third day of his internship at a NASA space flight center last summer. Iwastheone quotes ABC News: Wolf Cukier, 17...was tasked with going through data on star brightness from the facility's ongoing Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission or TESS. The Scarsdale High School senior was looking at a foreign system located 1,300 light-years from Earth. He said he then observed what appeared to be a slight darkness in one of the system's suns. It turned out that darkness was a planet 6.9 times larger than Earth that orbited two stars, what scientists call a circumbinary planet. "I had a lot of data in my notes that day about extremities in the binaries," Cukier said. "But when I saw this one, I put 10 asterisks next to it." Once he flagged the discovery to his research mentors, Cukier spent weeks with them and other scientists confirming his hypothesis. NASA said the teen's discovery was rare because circumbinary planets are usually difficult to find and scientists can only detect these planets during a transit event, when one of the suns shows a decrease in brightness... Because the two suns orbit each other every 15 days, it was harder to distinguish the transit events from the planet, dubbed TOI 1338-b, which take place every 93 to 95 days, according to NASA.

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