17-Year-Old NASA Intern Discovers First World With Two Stars

BYCole Blake2.2K Views
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NASA
NASA better offer this kid a job after his internship is over.

During his third day on the job, seventeen-year-old NASA intern Wolf Cukier was going over the variations in star brightness recorded by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, when he discovered a new planet, as noted by CNN.

"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 told NASA. "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."

"These are the types of signals that algorithms really struggle with," said Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at the SETI Institute and Goddard. "The human eye is extremely good at finding patterns in data, especially non-periodic patterns like those we see in transits from these systems."

TOI 1338 b, the planet found by Cukier, is 1,300 light-years away in the Pictor constellation and orbits two stars. "I discovered a planet. It has two stars which it orbits around," Cukier said. "So, if you think to Luke’s homeworld, Tatooine, from Star Wars, it’s like that. Every sunset, there’s gonna be two stars setting."


About The Author
Cole Blake is a current staff writer at HotNewHipHop based out of New York City. He began writing for the site as an intern back in 2018 while finishing his B.A. in Journalism at St. John’s University. In the time since, he’s covered a number of breaking stories for HNHH. These include the ongoing YSL RICO trial, the allegations surrounding Diddy, and much more. His work also extends outside of hip-hop, having written extensively about a myriad of topics including politics, sports, and pop culture. He’s attended several music festivals to provide coverage for the site as well, such as Rolling Loud and Governors Ball.
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