Teen NASA intern discovers a planet on his third day at work

Wolf Cukier is a 17-year-old teen from upstate New York, who started interning at NASA.

He is interning at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland

And he amazed everyone by discovering a new planet on the third day of his internship.

Cukier was examining variations in star brightness captured by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS.

At that time he saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338. 

At first, he thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.

"I first saw the initial dip and thought, 'Oh that looked cool,' but then when I looked at the full data from the telescope at that star, I, and my mentor also noticed, three different dips in the system."

The planet, "poetically" named TOI1338—which just has a ring to it— is 6.9 times the size of Earth (between Neptune and Saturn for reference) and lies in the constellation Pictor. 

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