Yale Admissions Office, Call This Kid!

Yahoo admires the high school student who discovered a new planet just three days into his NASA internship.

A New York high school student can put “planet discovery” on his resume after finding a new world during his NASA internship.

Wolf Cukier was working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland last summer when he uncovered TOI 1338 b — a planet orbiting two stars instead of one — while examining information captured by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), according to a release from the space agency.

“I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars circle around each other and from our view eclipse each other every orbit,” Cukier, 17, said in a statement. “About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338.”

He continued, “At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.”

RTWT