A high school student from the small town of Scarsdale, in the suburbs of New York, Wolf Zukier helped NASA on the third day of his internship with the space agency to discover the planet TOI 1338 b.
January 7, NASA announced about the discovery of an exoplanet that revolves around two stars at once. The 17-year-old Zukier, who underwent an internship at the Goddard Space Flight Center in the summer of 2019, helped find the TOI 1338 b agency: it is 6.9 times heavier than the Earth and is located in the constellation of the Painter – at a distance of 1300 light-years from the Solar System.
TOI 1338 b is not the first planet of its kind known to mankind, but it is the first planet from a binary system discovered with the TESS space telescope. In an interview with ABC, a high school student compared this exoplanet with fictional Tatooine – orbiting the two suns of the planet Luke Skywalker from Star Wars.
Zukier got a NASA internship after sending many emails to random researchers from various institutes. According to him, one of them told him: “I can’t take you, but I can direct you to someone who can take you”.
So a high school student received an invitation to NASA’s two-month internship in Maryland. There, Zukier studied the data obtained with the TESS telescope. Before an exoplanet was discovered, a teenager first mistook it for blackout or interference of a different kind. As a result, Zukier along with scientists from the Goddard Center, the universities of San Diego and Chicago became a co-author scientific article on TOI 1338 b.
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