NASA confirmed the discovery of TOI 1338b, a new planet 1300 light-years from Earth that orbits two stars at the same time. But it turned out that not only this was rare, but so was the fact that a tenth grader from the United States named Wolf Cukier assisted in the planet's opening.
The 17-year-old was invited to a NASA internship for two months in the summer of 2019. In June, he flew from New York to Goddard Space Flight Center, where his first job was to track changes in star brightness as part of the TESS telescope mission to find exoplanets.
TESS Planet Huners is a NASA initiative that encourages volunteers to assist scientists in the exploration of new planets. Cooker was studying data from volunteers about a two-star system during his internship when he found an unusual shadow in their orbit. The teen initially mistook it for a stellar eclipse, but this was contrary to the predictions. It turned out that this is a world, not just a shadow. Wolf was on his third day of training at NASA at the time.
Cooker's guess has been checked and confirmed by NASA officials. “These are precisely the forms of signals for which algorithms struggle. “The human eye is incredibly good at detecting things like that,” Veselin Kostov, a scientist, said.
In an interview with reporters, Cooker compared his discovery to Star Wars: “I assisted in the discovery of a planet that orbits around two stars. Each of them is ten times the size of the sun. Look, you can compare it to Luke [Skywalker] Tatooine's homeworld, in which two stars appear during each sunset.
The adolescent said that he had not yet decided what he wanted to do after school, but that physics and astrophysics were on his mind. He intends to attend one of three universities: Stanford, Princeton, or the University of Massachusetts.
This world appears to revolve around two stars, making it circumbinary.