You know how everyone says that the biggest learning from an internship is the exposure it provides? Well, looks like one intern found a better reward – a space discovery credited to him for eternity!
Our @NASAExoplanets mission @NASA_TESS has found its first planet with two suns ☀️☀️, located 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. A @NASAGoddard intern examined TESS data, first flagged by citizen scientists, to make this discovery: https://t.co/ADydGfx1uc pic.twitter.com/hkgCYYW5AQ
— NASA (@NASA) January 7, 2020
Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old high school student, is an intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. And, using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Sattelite (TESS), he discovered a new planet that orbits around two suns.
A signal that was originally thought to be from a stellar eclipse in the TOI 1338 system turned out to be from a new world! This planet became TESS’s first circumbinary planet, a world orbiting two stars. https://t.co/awfr84uuu2 pic.twitter.com/XJia9P0xYc
— NASA Universe (@NASAUniverse) January 7, 2020
Reportedly, Cukier made the discovery after just three days into his internship. The newly identified planet is a part of the Pictor constellation, has been christened as TOI 1388b and orbits two stars, one of which is bigger than our Sun by 15%.
The planet, which is 6.9 times larger than Earth, is only the 13th of its kind discovered so far. Talk about being a model employee!
