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17-Year-Old Discovers New Planet Three Days Into Internship With Nasa
Remember when you were an intern?
Standard daily duties include getting coffee, making copies and basically working your bum bums off just to get some kind of recognition.
Most days, you're ignored.
Well, it would have been pretty susah to ignore this teenage Nasa intern, especially after he discovered a new planet after just three days at the office!
According to a report in The Guardian, Wolf Cukier, 17, made the discovery while peering through the agency’s orbiting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
An accidental discovery
He was assigned to study how two stars would cross paths creating an eclipse and decided to focus on the solar system T01 1338.
That's when he noticed an unusual object in the orbit of two stars that was blocking the light.
After letting his seniors know about his discovery, they studied the object for a couple of weeks and concluded that the object was a planet 6.9 times larger than Earth and only the 13th planet of its kind ever discovered.
Oops, I spotted a new planet
“The planet blocked the light from those two stars, leading to a small dip in the amount of light that reached the telescope. That’s what I noticed at first.”
“It was like, oh … there’s something here that was cool. But it’s also not like there’s a single moment of discovery,” Cukier told CBS.
Research on the newly discovered planet, now named TOI 1338 b, was presented during the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu.
Cukier also co-authored a paper along with established scientists, which has been submitted to a scientific journal.
Cukier said he hoped the discovery will help launch his career.
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