He didn’t just discover a new planet, but one of an extremely unusual, hard-to-spot kind. And he did it at 17, on his third day as a NASA intern. Nice.
Interning at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center last summer, as The Post reported Thursday, Scarsdale HS senior Wolf Cukier used the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite system to spot the planet now named TOI 1338 b — which circles not one but two stars in a binary solar system.
That peculiar orbit makes such circumbinary planets especially difficult to identify.
Announced Monday at the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu, the discovery is the topic of a scientific-journal paper Cukier co-authored with scientists from Goddard, San Diego State University, the University of Chicago and other institutions.
Cukier regrets that he “didn’t find anything else for the rest of the internship.” That’s OK, kid: Your résumé is already looking … astronomical.