USA – A seventeen year old boy has found a new planet while interning at NASA.
According to NASA
When Wolf Cukier finished his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York, he joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as a summer intern. His job was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and uploaded to the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science project.
“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 said. “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.”
The New planet now called TESS has been described as the first circumbinary planet orbiting two stars. This unique planets suns orbit each other every 15 days and one of those suns is 10% larger than our sun. The Planet is 6.9 times larger than Earth.
