NASA Intern, 17, Finds Planet With Two Suns in 3 Days

Most teenagers spend their summer internships filing papers or making coffee runs, but seventeen-year-old Wolf Cukier discovered a planet orbiting two suns just three days into his job at NASA.

In 2019, Cukier was analyzing data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite at the Goddard Space Flight Center. His task was straightforward: examine light curves, graphs showing how star brightness changes over time.

When brightness dips, it usually means something is blocking the light. But Cukier noticed something odd: a dip that appeared at an unexpected time in the data.

While others might have dismissed it as a glitch, Cukier flagged the anomaly. That decision led to the discovery of TOI-1338 b, a planet roughly seven times the size of Earth located 1,300 light years away in the constellation Pictor.

What makes this planet special is that it orbits two stars instead of one, just like the fictional planet Tatooine from Star Wars. These circumbinary planets are incredibly rare and difficult to spot because the two stars themselves orbit each other, creating irregular shadow patterns.

One star in the system is about ten percent more massive than our sun, while the other is much cooler and dimmer. The planet's transits across these stars happen at unpredictable intervals, making them easy to miss.

Cukier's discovery required assembling a team of researchers from multiple organizations to confirm his findings. The verification process proved him right: he had found something genuinely new.

The Ripple Effect

This teenager's sharp eye changed more than just his summer. His discovery prompted scientists to look more carefully at the same system, leading them to find a second planet, TOI-1338 c, years later using a different detection method.

The finding proved that NASA's TESS mission could identify even the trickiest planets hidden in messy data. More importantly, it demonstrated that human observation still matters in an age of artificial intelligence.

Computers excel at following rules, but humans excel at noticing when something breaks the pattern. That tiny irregularity Cukier spotted had been traveling through space for billions of years, waiting for someone curious enough to investigate why the light didn't behave as expected.

The discovery turned a challenging binary star system into a natural laboratory for studying how planets form in complicated environments. Scientists now use TOI-1338 to understand how worlds can emerge and survive when orbiting not one, but two suns.

Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs start with someone willing to trust their instincts about what doesn't look quite right.