Teenager Aims for the Stars and Discovers New Planet on the Third Day of His NASA Internship

Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old Scarsdale High School student, surpassed all expectations and discovered a new planet in his first two months as an intern at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center during the summer of 2019. It all unfolded after he spotted something intriguing while working on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Cukier told NASA, as reported by CNBC , "I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars orbit each other and eclipse each other from our view. 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 planet named "TOI 1338 b," was situated about 1,300 light-years away in the constellation called Pictor. Knewz.com noted that it was 6.9 times larger than Earth and orbited two stars. Cukier explained to NBC 4 New York , "I noticed a dip, or a transit, from the TOI 1338 system, and that was the first signal of a planet. I first saw the initial dip and thought, ‘Oh, that looked cool,’ but then, when I looked at the full data from the telescope, I and my mentor also noticed three different dips in the system."

TOI 1338 b was identified as a circumbinary planet, but it was not habitable due to extremely high temperatures and the lack of a solid surface. Cukier told ABC News , "Our confidence went up and down a couple of times, but by the end of the internship, we were confident that what we found was a planet." After the confirmation, the work was presented at a panel during the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu.

Astonished by his find, Cukier admitted while talking to VOA , "Yes what I did is impressive, but it also didn't take that many special skills. So, if someone is interested in science, like my age, and even if they don't have training, they should still just reach out to researchers and find something that they can do because almost anyone can look through data looking for dips. It just happened to be me, who saw this one."

NASA was amazed by the discovery, as circumbinary planets were difficult to detect since scientists could only spot these planets during a transit event when one of the suns dimmed. Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at Goddard, told NASA, "These are the types of signals that algorithms struggled with. The human eye was very good at finding patterns in data, especially non-periodic ones like those from these systems."

In the TOI 1338 system, one sun was 10% bigger than Earth's sun, and the other was 30% of the sun's mass. Since the two suns orbited each other every 15 days, it was challenging to separate the changes in their light from the planet’s transits, which occurred every 93 to 95 days. Cukier also shared his plans to study physics or astrophysics in college and expressed hope to attend Stanford, Princeton, or MIT the following fall.