A senior from Scarsdale High School in New York has made a rare discovery on behalf of NASA — a planet orbiting two stars.
The star student, Wolf Cukier, was just three days into an internship at NASA when he found the planet.
It was all part of an internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which he began after his junior year. There, he was charged with analyzing variations in star brightness with data gathered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS.
Cukier’s find is TESS’ first circumbinary planet — a world that orbits two stars. The discovery was announced at the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu on Monday.
“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 in a statement from NASA.
“About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338,” he said. “At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.”
The previously known TOI 1338 system lies within a constellation 1,300 light-years away. The newly discovered planet, dubbed TOI 1338 b, is the only known planet in the system. It’s about 6.9 times larger than Earth, or somewhere between the sizes of Neptune and Saturn.
Astronomers find new planets by detecting their transit, or when one celestial body makes a pass across a larger body, indicated by a dip in brightness of the larger body — in this case, the larger of TOI 1338’s stars.
But the new planet’s transit across the smaller star is undetectable with TESS — and that’s where the naked eye can help.
“These are the types of signals that algorithms really struggle with,” said the study’s lead author, Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at the SETI Institute and Goddard Space Flight Center. “The human eye is extremely good at finding patterns in data, especially non-periodic patterns like those we see in transits from these systems.”
Since the two stars in the TOI 1338 system orbit each other about every 15 days, Cukier originally thought the dimming was caused by the smaller star crossing in front of the larger, according to the statement.
But upon further investigation, he realized the timing was off for the star’s eclipse.
In other words, Cukier should have plenty of material for his college application essays.
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Scarsdale teen discovers new planet while interning at NASA - New York Post
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