A school student interning at Nasa helped to discover a planet with two stars, the agency has announced.
In 2019, Wolf Cukier joined Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, US, as a summer intern, and helped to discover a planet now named TOI 1338 b on his third day at the agency.
He said: “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.
“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.”
Mr Cukier’s job was to examine variations in star brightness captured by Nasa’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and upload them to TESS’s citizen science project.
Our @NASAExoplanets mission @NASA_TESS has found its first planet with two suns ☀️☀️, located 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. A @NASAGoddard intern examined TESS data, first flagged by citizen scientists, to make this discovery: https://t.co/ADydGfx1uc pic.twitter.com/hkgCYYW5AQ
— NASA (@NASA) January 7, 2020
The TESS mission began searching for planets in the summer of 2018, and has now discovered its first circumbinary planet, a world orbiting two stars.
The newly-discovered planet, TOI 1338 b, is around 6.9 times larger than Earth. One of its stars is about 10% larger than our Sun, while the other star is cooler, dimmer and only one-third the Sun’s mass.
The planet lies in a system 1,300 light years away from the Earth in the constellation Pictor.
TOI 1338 b’s discovery was featured in a Nasa panel discussion on Monday in Honolulu, Hawaii.
A paper, co-authored by Mr Cukier along with scientists from Goddard, San Diego State University, the University of Chicago and other institutions, has been submitted to a scientific journal.
