17-Year-Old Discovers a New Planet On the Third Day of His NASA Internship (go.com) 30
17-year-old Wolf Cukier made a big discovery on the third day of his internship at a NASA space flight center last summer. A reader quotes ABC News:
Wolf Cukier, 17...was tasked with going through data on star brightness from the facility's ongoing Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission or TESS. The Scarsdale High School senior was looking at a foreign system located 1,300 light-years from Earth. He said he then observed what appeared to be a slight darkness in one of the system's suns.
It turned out that darkness was a planet 6.9 times larger than Earth that orbited two stars, what scientists call a circumbinary planet.
"I had a lot of data in my notes that day about extremities in the binaries," Cukier said. "But when I saw this one, I put 10 asterisks next to it."
Once he flagged the discovery to his research mentors, Cukier spent weeks with them and other scientists confirming his hypothesis. NASA said the teen's discovery was rare because circumbinary planets are usually difficult to find and scientists can only detect these planets during a transit event, when one of the suns shows a decrease in brightness... Because the two suns orbit each other every 15 days, it was harder to distinguish the transit events from the planet, dubbed TOI 1338-b, which take place every 93 to 95 days, according to NASA.
It turned out that darkness was a planet 6.9 times larger than Earth that orbited two stars, what scientists call a circumbinary planet.
"I had a lot of data in my notes that day about extremities in the binaries," Cukier said. "But when I saw this one, I put 10 asterisks next to it."
Once he flagged the discovery to his research mentors, Cukier spent weeks with them and other scientists confirming his hypothesis. NASA said the teen's discovery was rare because circumbinary planets are usually difficult to find and scientists can only detect these planets during a transit event, when one of the suns shows a decrease in brightness... Because the two suns orbit each other every 15 days, it was harder to distinguish the transit events from the planet, dubbed TOI 1338-b, which take place every 93 to 95 days, according to NASA.
Re:News? (Score:4, Informative)
Discovery of an extrasolar planet is not news? How jaded we've become.
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Ignore him, he's just jealous that this kid at 17 has done more than he has ever done.
Re:News? (Score:4, Interesting)
Discovery of an extrasolar planet is not news? How jaded we've become.
We have discovered more than 4000 exoplanets. We discover more almost every day. So yet another is not news.
What makes this news:
1. It involves a teenager named "Wolf".
2. It involves a planet orbiting a BINARY STAR system. A few years ago, we didn't even think that was possible.
Re: News? (Score:3)
Speak for yourself. Some of us were already familiar with Tatooine and Magrathea. ;)
So that is who Wolf 359 is named after (Score:5, Funny)
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It's already named for an Outer Limits episode...
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Star Trek actually ripped off the same episode twice - first the name in TNG, and then the premise (planet existing at an accelerated time rate and evolved rapidly compared to the rest of the universe) in Voyager. It was one of the less-ridiculous Voyager plots, actually.
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As the finder of the new planet... (Score:5, Funny)
Interns are Cheaper Than Computers? (Score:3)
The kid definitely deserves to have this planet named after him.
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They're cheaper than paying an engineer to program a computer.
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Best educational experience (Score:3)
As a 17-year old this student got to experience how serious scientific research is done.
While computers can do the job of analysing large data sets, there is no substitute to analysing some of the data by hand.
Only then one can get a good understanding of how the data is analysed, and can pass it to computers in full knowlege of what is going on.
Great story, but... (Score:2)
how is this planet hunting working, are the interns staring at videos, hopefully small variations of light? One would think that neither the eye's sensitivity, nor human attention, nor even the dynamic and spatial range of computer displays is competitive for such things in contrast to just identifying unusual variations based on preprocessed (eg. calibrated for known starts to have constant light), but not necessarily displayed data.
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Is it flat? (Score:2)
6,9 times larger than Earth (Score:2)
Is that by diameter, or mass?
If its diameter its probably a small gas giant.
Maybe the kid's more competent than NASA? (Score:1)
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Is it painful to be that stupid? I certainly hope so.
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Unless you have good reasons to wager that current NASA crop has a steep drop of competency compared to previous generations, NASA has the best track record and best competencies (or on par with other top agencies as No.1) in space exploration in the world.
Otherwise, this (possibly rhetorical) question sounds like a product of a severe "all government agencies are useless" bias, and one needs to be careful of severe bias like this as it's probably clouding your basic daily judgements without you knowing i
So they basically found tatooine (Score:2)
So is it a desert planet? Need to get the JWST online to get a better look