On the third day of his internship at NASA, a 17-year-old student made a groundbreaking discovery by identifying a new planet.

Wolf Cukier, a high school intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, made a groundbreaking discovery during his third day on the job. Upon joining in the summer of 2019 at the age of 17, his primary responsibility was to analyze the brightness fluctuations of stars captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). However, during this process, he stumbled upon a new planet within a remarkable star system located 1,300 light years away from Earth.
“I combed through the data for any objects flagged by volunteers as an eclipsing binary, a binary star system where the stars orbit each other and periodically block each other’s light,” explained Wolf Cukier. My internship commenced just three days ago when I detected a signal from a celestial body known as TOI 1338b. Initially, I found it fascinating.
TOI 1338b, the first circumbinary planet identified by TESS, revolves around two stars instead of one.

One star is 10% larger than our Sun, while the other is approximately a third more massive, cooler, and dimmer.

The celestial body, situated in the space between Neptune and Saturn, boasts a size that is about 6.9 times greater than that of Earth. Several visuals showcasing the planet TOI 1388b have been released to the public, causing a sensation on the World Wide Web. These depictions of the planet exhibit a charming array of pastel hues, including tones of bubblegum pink, light green, lavender, and soft violet.

It is important to note that these images do not accurately represent the actual appearance of the planet; they were artificially generated. Even with regards to exoplanets orbiting distant stars, our current telescopic technology is not advanced enough to observe all the planets within our own solar system.

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