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Featured Article: “How’s Your Internship Going? This Teen Found a Planet”
Wolf Cukier, a teenager from Scarsdale, N.Y., spent the summer before his senior year interning at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. In his time interning, he identified a body that was later confirmed to be a planet, now known as TOI 1338 b.
In this lesson, you will learn about the process that Wolf was a part of that invites everyday people to become scientists. In the Going Further activity, you will be given a chance to become a planet hunter yourself — or participate in another citizen science project.
Warm Up
What do you know about how planets are discovered and identified? In the article, Wolf scrutinized data that was collected from TESS, or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. To learn more about how TESS works to gather data, watch this Times video from 2018 and answer the questions.
transcript
How NASA’s TESS Spacecraft Will Hunt Exoplanets
NASA’s TESS spacecraft will spend two years searching the sky for nearby alien worlds.
Our Milky Way galaxy is strewn with billions of planets, alien worlds still unseen by human eyes — at least for now. Only three decades ago we didn’t know if there were planets beyond our own solar system. In 1995, astronomers discovered that a star in the constellation Pegasus was wobbling back and forth, tugged by the gravity of an unseen planet, an exoplanet, a hot and hellish world unfit for life as we know it. The wobble method of planet hunting relies on sensitive spectroscopes. As an orbiting planet tugs on its star, the starlight we see shifts from blue to red and back again. The Kepler space telescope was launched in 2009. It found thousands of exoplanets by staring at a small patch of the Milky Way. Kepler didn’t look for wobbles. It looked for small dips in starlight, when a planet crosses in front of its star. Kepler found systems of planets, groups of worlds swirling around their star, lonely planets encased in ice, other worlds scorched by fire, newborn planets shrouded in dust, waterworlds, and planets swept by global storms, planets dancing in orbit with two stars, or even three, and even planets from other galaxies that were swallowed up by the Milky Way. In recent years, astronomers have taken the first direct images of exoplanets, blurry pixels of alien landscapes. We’ve discovered a free-floating planet not bound to any star. And we’ve seen signs of planets being born, infant worlds scoring dark rings in the dust around their stars. Now a new planet hunter will join the search. On April 16, 2018, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will lift off from Cape Canaveral. TESS will spend two years scrutinizing the entire sky, watching nearby stars for minute dips in brightness caused by a nearby alien world. TESS’ four cameras cover a swath of the sky 96 degrees tall. TESS will divide the sky into sections like the slices of an orange and stare at each section for 27 days, then move on to the next. After two years we will have covered the whole sky. TESS will fly an unusual orbit, swooping as far out as the moon every two weeks before falling back close to Earth and dumping a torrent of data to eager astronomers. TESS is a target hunter. The planets it finds can be studied by the next generation of telescopes on Earth and in space. With luck TESS will discover worlds suitable for lakes and oceans, with rich atmospheres and chemical signals we can detect. Their gases could tell us whether these planets are habitable or inhabited by the likes of us. The Milky Way holds more planets than stars and a diversity that we still haven’t begun to plumb In the search for life and meaning in the cosmos, our own world is still the gold standard.
What is the “wobble method” of planet hunting?
How did the Kepler space telescope spot planets by using starlight?
What does the TESS spacecraft look for to identify planets? What do scientists hope TESS will be able to accomplish? How might TESS’s findings contribute to our knowledge of space?
Questions for Writing and Discussion
Read the article, then answer the following questions:
1. What was Wolf responsible for doing in his internship? How did he work to identify TOI 1338 b?
2. How do TESS’s camera and graphing systems operate? Can you explain the systems in a way that a fifth grader could understand?
3. Veselin Kostov, Wolf’s mentor and a research scientist, talked about the shortcomings of algorithms in analyzing TESS’s data. How does the thought process that Wolf went through when first looking at the TOI 1338 b data support Mr. Kostov’s point?
4. What was the verification process that scientists went through to confirm planet TOI 1338 b?
5. How has Wolf talked about the experience of identifying an exoplanet?
Going Further
The article refers to “citizen science,” which is scientific research, observation or analysis done by everyday people. Have you ever wondered about the herpetofauna (reptiles and amphibians) in your area or wanted to make your city safer for cyclists? Maybe you’ve observed how your dog has aged over time or you’re interested in the precipitation levels in your region. These are all examples of citizen science projects that you could be a part of, or that could inspire you and your class to create your own.
After reading the article, we encourage you to support and contribute to NASA’s TESS by searching for exoplanets using TESS’s observation tool: Planet Hunters TESS. You will first need to read a short tutorial on how to identify and mark transits, and then you can become a planet hunter. If you prefer to look at images of planets, you can help scientists to characterize surfaces on Mars using Planet Four: Terrains and Planet Four: Ridges.
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