A new Planet Discovered by a 17-Year-Old Boy on His Third Day of Internship at NASA

Update: 2020-01-12 13:33 IST

Wolf Cukier discovered a planetary system with two stars while first time working for NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess) programmed.

In a summer internship in NASA, a 17-year-old high school boy from New York turned out to be a remarkable discovery, that has made headlines worldwide.

Wolf Cukier from Scarsdale has discovered a new planet that revolves around two stars while he was doing his internship at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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On the third day as an intern in the Space Research Centre when the planet, which has been named as TOI 1338b with a mass which is 7 times larger than Earth and is located 1300 light-years away.

On the other side, according to NASA, he found one of the stars is approx.10 per cent more than the size of the sun and another only a third of the sun's mass and less bright.

Reports says, Wolf was working for NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess) program, and in the first time he discovered a planetary system with two stars.

In the month of June, Wolf went on to co-author a journal along with the other scientists from different US universities based on his discovery.

The work eventually went on to be featured at a panel at the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu in this week.

The Washington Post, reported that Wolf was placed under the guidance of research scientist Veselin Kostov, who admitted that he never had a high school intern before.

He also said that Wolf's finding has proven to be a "positive sign" for the Tess program as he believes that in future this will lead to the discovery of more planets.

It takes two-three months to conclude the entire process of confirming Wolf's research.

Now, Wolf is waiting to to finish his last year at high school and looks forward to studying physics or astrophysics at either Stanford University, MIT University or Princeton University in the state.

As per the report of The Telegraph, Wolf could be back in NASA after his study programmes and possibly indulge in more discoveries. "Future research would involve finding more planets," Wolf said. 

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