17-year-old discovers planet 6.9 times larger than Earth on third day of internship with NASA

During his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York, Wolf Cukier landed a two-month internship with NASA. So during the summer of 2019, he traveled down to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

His first assignment was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS, as a part of the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science project. (The citizen science project allows people who don't work for NASA to help with finding new planets.)

Just three days into his internship, Cukier discovered a new planet.

NASA announced the news on their website this week, after confirming the teenager's work, submitting a paper that Cukier co-authored for scientific review and announcing the discovery of the planet, now named "TOI 1338 b," at the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting.

"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," 17-year-old Cukier tells NASA. "About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338. At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet."

"I noticed a dip, or a transit, from the TOI 1338 system, and that was the first signal of a planet," Cukier explains to NBC 4 New York. "I first saw the initial dip and thought, 'Oh that looked cool,' but then when I looked at the full data from the telescope at that star, I, and my mentor also noticed, three different dips in the system."