17-Year-Old High Schooler Discovered A New Planet Only 3 Days Into His NASA Internship

Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old high school student from New York, began his internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt in the summer of 2019, where he examined fluctuations in star brightness acquired by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS.

The youngster found a completely new planet in a system 1,300 light-years away from us on the third day of his internship.

A 17-year-old high school student found a new planet, TOI 1338b, during his internship at NASA in 2019.

“I was going through the data for anything the volunteers had classified as an eclipsing binary,” Wolf Cukier told CNN.

“An eclipsing binary is a system in which two stars revolve around one other and, from our perspective, eclipse each other every orbit.” “I saw a signal from a system named TOI 1338b around three days into my internship.” I initially mistook it for a solar eclipse, but the timing was off. “It turned out to be a planet,” says the narrator.

The planet is circumbinary, which means it revolves around two stars rather than one.

The newly discovered planet, TOI 1388b, is TESS’s first circumbinary planet, orbiting two stars instead of one. “One is roughly 10% more massive than our Sun,” NASA Goddard reports, “while the other is colder, darker, and just one-third the Sun’s mass.” TOI 1388b is 6.9 times the size of Earth, falling somewhere between Neptune and Saturn.

Someone recently released a few TOI 1388b produced photos that became viral on the internet. Warning: it’s very stunning.

A few produced photos of TOI 1388b were recently released and have since taken the internet by storm.

The planet looks to have a captivating pastel hue appearance in these created photos, with bubblegum pink, soft purple, lavender, and light green tones. The photographs have already received over 1.2 million likes and 224 thousand retweets just a few days after being uploaded on Twitter!

The photographs gained 1.2 million likes and 224k retweets on Twitter in only a few days.

It’s important to note that these photos were generated by a bot and are not real shots of the globe. “We don’t yet have telescopes capable of resolving any of our solar system’s planets (we just recently discovered what Pluto looks like after sending a spacecraft near to it), let alone any exoplanets from other star systems.” “Realistically, that won’t alter in the next 50 years,” a Twitter user replied. “We won’t be able to take shots that far… But it’s true… Another commenter wrote, “It’s merely an artistic representation of the globe.”

The internet, of course, had a lot to say about this amazing world.