New York teen discovers new planet while interning with NASA

The newly identified world is 6.9 times bigger than Earth and orbits two suns.

A New York teen reached for the stars last summer and found a one-of-a-kind planet.

Wolf Cukier, 17, an intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, last July, was tasked with going through data on star brightness from the facility’s ongoing Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission or TESS. The Scarsdale High School senior was looking at a foreign system located 1,300 light-years from Earth. He said he then observed what appeared to be a slight darkness in one of the system's suns.

It turned out that darkness was a planet 6.9 times larger than Earth that orbited two stars, what scientists call a circumbinary planet.

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