Science & TechnologyJAN 19, 2021

17-Year-Old High Schooler Discovered A New Planet Only 3 Days Into His NASA Internship

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Back in summer 2019, 17-year-old high school student Wolf Cukier from New York joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt to start his internship, where his job was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, also known as TESS.

On the third day of his internship, the teenager discovered a brand new planet lying in a system 1,300 light-years away from us.

Back in 2019, during his internship at NASA, a 17-year-old high school student discovered a new planet, now known as TOI 1338b

Image credits: NASA Goddard

"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," Wolf Cukier told CNN. "About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338b. At first, I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet."

The planet is circumbinary, which means that it orbits two stars instead of one

Image credits: NASA Goddard

The new planet, now known as TOI 1388b, is TESS’s first circumbinary planet, which means that it orbits two stars instead of one. "One is about 10% more massive than our Sun, while the other is cooler, dimmer and only one-third the Sun’s mass," NASA Goddard writes. TOI 1388b itself is approximately 6.9 times larger than Earth—between the sizes of Neptune and Saturn.

Recently, someone released a few generated images of TOI 1388b that took the internet by storm. Spoiler alert—it's absolutely gorgeous.

Recently, a few generated images of TOI 1388b were released and, since then, have taken the internet by storm

Image credits: paintwater_boba

In these generated images, the planet appears to have a mesmerizing pastel color appearance, featuring bubblegum pink, soft purple, lavender, and light green shades. Just a few days after being shared on Twitter, the post containing the images already has over 1.2 million likes and more than 224 thousand retweets!

In just a few days, the images received 1.2M likes and over 224k retweets on Twitter

Image credits: paintwater_boba

It's worth noting that these images were created by a bot and aren't actual photographs of the planet. "We don’t have telescopes yet capable to resolve all the planets in our solar system (we just recently found out what Pluto looks like after we sent a spacecraft close to it), let alone any exoplanets from other star systems. That won’t change in the next 50 years, realistically," a Twitter user commented. "We cant take photos that far... but it's real... it's just artistic depiction of the planet," another user added.