Image credits: NASA Goddard
On January 7, NASA announced the discovery of a new planet TOI 1338b,
which is 1300 light-years from Earth and orbits two stars at once. But not only
this turned out to be unusual, but also the fact that a tenth grader from the
United States named Wolf Cukier helped open the planet.
In the summer of 2019, the 17-year-old received a two-month invitation
to a NASA internship. In June, he traveled from New York to the Goddard Space
Flight Center: his first assignment was to observe the change in the brightness
of stars as part of the TESS telescope mission to search for exoplanets.
NASA has the TESS Planet Huners project, which allows volunteers to
help scientists discover new planets. During the early days of his internship,
Cooker studied data from volunteers about a two-star system and noticed a
strange shadow in their orbit. At first, the teenager thought it was a stellar
eclipse, but this was at odds with the forecasts. It turned out that this is
not just a shadow, but a planet. By that time, Wolf was training at NASA for
the third day.
NASA officials have verified and confirmed Cooker’s guess. “These are
exactly the types of signals that algorithms have problems with. The human eye
is extremely good at finding something like that, ”said the scientist Veselin
Kostov.
Cooker himself, in a conversation with reporters, compared his find
with Star Wars: “I helped discover a planet that revolves around two stars. One
of them is 10% larger than the sun. Look, you can draw an analogy to the
homeworld of Luke [Skywalker] Tatooine – that is, during each sunset, two stars
will appear. “
The teenager said that he had not yet decided what he would do after
school, but his plans were to study physics and astrophysics. He plans to
attend Stanford, Princeton, or the University of Massachusetts.
This specific planet seems to orbit 2 stars making it circumbinary.
Image credits: NASA Goddard
Here are some of the recently released generated pictures of the TOI
1388b. Most of the people fell in love with these fantastic images.
Image credits: paintwater_boba
Image credits: paintwater_boba
3 Comments
He looks like spok
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ReplyDeleteThe images are ridiculous; this planet is 1300 light years away - no one would have any idea what it looks like! These images are completely arbitrary.
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