17-year-old discovers planet 6.9 times larger than Earth on third day of internship with NASA

[Eric]

17-year-old discovers planet 6.9 times larger than Earth on third day of internship with NASA

On the third day of a summer internship at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Scarsdale teen Wolf Cukier discovered planet TOI 1338 b.

www.cnbc.com

 

[mollyc]

i read this headline to my daughter, who is 16. she said, “everyone thinks we are always on our phones, but we do other stuff.”

 

[Nycturne]

Not to discount the discovery, but from the article:

His first assignment was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS, as a part of the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science project. (The citizen science project allows people who don’t work for NASA to help with finding new planets.)

Finding something like this while not inevitable, is expected. The fact that he's interning at NASA while still in high school says more about his prospects and skillset, IMO. I'd be interested in the story about how that happened.

That said, hey, anything that keeps folks interested in STEM. And this is an important contribution, as this adds more planets we can start making atmospheric measurements in the coming years to get a better idea of what is "average" for planets in the galaxy beyond our single solar system example.