Everyone remembers the first internship of their lives. From getting used to the work regime to the new things one would get to learn -- it is an experience that widen your horizons and makes you grow.?
The chances of doing something groundbreaking is fairly limited in an internship, not if your employer is NASA, as this lucky intern got to find out just on his third day at work.
17-year-old Wolf Cukier from Scarsdale, New York discovered a planet on the third day of his internship. He had recently completed his junior high school and had headed to intern at NASA¡¯s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The planet dubbed TOI 1338b is around seven times larger than Earth. It also has two stars -- one being 10-percent more massive than our sun, whereas the other one was smaller with less light -- very similar to Tatooine, the planet where Luke Skywalker from Star Wars grew up.
This was Wolf¡¯s second internship at NASA. He previously (2018) worked on a Goldilocks Zone project under the guidance of NASA aerospace technology researcher Ravi Kopparapu. However, this time he was interning at the space flight complex and was under the mentorship of NASA research scientist Veselin Kostov.
Wolf was working on NASA¡¯s TESS or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite looking for other planets and celestial objects in the universe. He was given a framework of what to look for based on his exploring the Planet Hunters TESS data and segregate different star systems.?
Wolf was looking at an image when he stumbled upon something unusual. He notified Kostov immediately and they both spent hours verifying that the additional features they were seeing were real by looking through multiple data sets.
It took around two to three months to cross-verify data sets and confirm Wolf¡¯s discovery of the planet.?
Wolf Cukier co-wrote a paper about this discovery with scientists from Goddard and other institutions. It is awaiting scientific review.
Cukier is currently looking at colleges like Princeton University, Stanford, MIT to major in astrophysics or physics.?