In 2019, Wolf Cukier, a junior at Scarsdale High School in New York, began working as a summer intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. As part of his role, he was tasked with assessing changes in star brightness captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and uploaded to the Planet Hunters TESS citizen research project. Cukier told NASA that he was searching through the data for eclipsing binaries, a system where two stars orbit each other and from our perspective, they eclipse each other every orbit. During his third day on the job, Cukier discovered a signal from a system named TOI 1338. Initially, he believed it to be a stellar eclipse, but after closer examination, he determined it was a planet.
During an interview with CNBC, Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old summer intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, recounted his discovery of a planet. Cukier explained that he first noticed a dip, or transit, from the TOI 1338 system, which was the initial signal of a planet. Upon examining the full data from the telescope at that star, he and his mentor noticed three different dips in the system. Being a massive fan of “Star Wars,” with framed posters of the movie in his bedroom, Cukier felt that his discovery was comparable to that of the popular sci-fi series. He described the newly discovered planet as having two stars that it orbits around, similar to Tatooine, Luke’s homeworld. With two stars setting every sunset, he compared it to the iconic scene from “Star Wars.”
TOI 1338 b, the first planet discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that revolves around two stars, is estimated to be 6.9 times the size of Earth, putting it in between the sizes of Neptune and Saturn. The planet is located about 1,300 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Pictor, which is much farther than the distance between Earth and the Sun, which is around 7 to 9 light minutes. The two stars that TOI 1338 b orbits around are collectively referred to as an “eclipsing binary,” with one of the stars being about 10% bigger than the Sun.
Ground-based radial velocity surveys were conducted to study TOI 1338 in the past, but it was only with the help of TESS that the planet was discovered and validated. According to the team led by Veselin Kostov, TOI 1338 b will have a stable orbit for at least the next 10 million years. However, due to changes in the planet’s orbit angle to Earth, the transit of the planet will cease after November 2023 and resume again eight years later.
NASA has reported that finding circumbinary planets such as TOI 1338 b can be difficult because they can be mistaken for eclipses by standard software, which is why interns like Cukier are so valuable. “These are the types of signals that algorithms really struggle with,” says Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at Goddard. “The human eye is extremely good at finding patterns in data, especially non-periodic patterns like those we see in transits from these systems.”
Following his historic discovery, Wolf Cukier is now exploring his options for college and has expressed that his top three choices are Princeton, MIT, and Stanford.