Interning usually is the most difficult time of one’s life. You have to do a lot of work that is not even related to the job as there is no job description for an intern.
But for one 17-year-old named Wolf Cukier from New York changed it all. When he was an intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt he did something amazing.
Wolf landed a two-month internship with NASA during the summer of 2019. His first assignment was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS. This was under the part of the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science project which allows people who don’t work for NASA to help with finding new planets.
Just three days into his internship he located a whole new planet located 1,300 light-years away from earth.
The planet has unique pastel colors and was named TOI 1338b.
Wolf Cukier explained that on the third day of his internship he saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338b. At first, he thought it was a stellar eclipse ( an eclipse of one star by another in a binary system) but the timing was wrong and it turned out to be a planet.
TOI 1338b is the first planet captured by the TESS system that is considered circumbinary which means it orbits two stars instead of one.
Goddard from NASA explained – “One is about 10% more massive than our Sun, while the other is cooler, dimmer and only one-third of the Sun’s mass”.
Few of the generated pictures of TOI 1338b were released and it became an instant hit among people.
Internet is just in love with its unique colors.
The picture has already had more than 1.5M likes and around 250k retweets in just a few days.
