17-Year-Old Nasa Intern Discovers New Planet On Third Day On The Job

Jan 16, 2020 by apost team

Star Trek’s Captain Kirk said it best: space is the final frontier. As our technology improves, we learn more and more about the vastness of the cosmos. In a shocking turn of events, a 17-year-old intern at NASA recently discovered a new planet.

According to the Telegraph, Wolf Cukier was working with a group of interns around his age when he made the startling discovery. Even more surprising, Wolf was only on the third day of his internship. In a new report released by the space agency, NASA told of how Wolf and the other interns were working with TESS, a satellite specially designed to search for new planets, when he made the discovery.

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Wolf explained how he made the discovery during an appearance on Strahan, Sara, and Keke earlier this week. Wolf said that the planet orbits two suns, giving the analogy of Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet from the Star Wars series. These types suns, called eclipsing binaries, circle each other and, from the view from the Earth, appear to eclipse each other every orbit. When analyzing the signal from an eclipse from system TOI 1338, Wolf determined that the timing of the eclipse was wrong. Rather than a stellar eclipse, the eclipse came from a then undiscovered planet.

Wolf’s planet has been named TOI 1338 b, which denotes that it orbits a planet 1,300 light years from our Solar System. TOI 1338 b is massive at nearly 7 times larger than Earth. By comparison, this makes it similar in size to Neptune or Saturn. Experts further say that upon analysis, it is very unlikely that the new planet can sustain life.

The suns of TOI 1338 b complete an orbit around each other every 15 days. The two sun are also vastly different in size. While one star is about 10 percent larger than our Sun, the other is just a third of the Sun’s mass. This smaller sun is also dimmer and cooler than the larger one.

After Wolf made the discovery, he and the research team used a computer program named eleanor to confirm that it was in fact a new celestial body and not just an instrument malfunction. The program is named after Eleanor Arroway, the protagonist of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. Adina Feinstein, a graduate student from the University of Chicago who co-authored the study that Wolf was a member of, explained that eleanor helps researchers at NASA analyze the data from the millions of stars being tracked by TESS.

What do you think of Wolf’s discovery?