If you have ever been an intern, you most likely ended up performing all the tasks that everyone else detested, such as carrying boxes of paperwork or making sure the coffee maker is always full.
But not Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old from New York. A new planet 1,300 light-years away from Earth was found by the adolescent in 2019, three days into his internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. The planet, designated TOI 1338b, has an unusual appearance of pastel colors that give it the appearance of a massive bath bomb floating in space.
Wolf stated in a CNN interview that he was searching the data for anything that the volunteers had identified as an eclipsing binary. My internship began three days ago when I saw a signal from a device known as TOI 1338b. I initially believed it to be a star eclipse, but the timing was off. As the intern explained, it turned out to be a planet.
NASA Goddard states, “One is about 10% more massive than our Sun, while the other is cooler, dimmer, and only one-third the mass of the Sun.” The recently found planet is over seven times bigger than Earth. Recently, some generated images of TOI 1388b have surfaced, and they are really captivating.
In just a few days, the planetarium images have racked up over 1.2 million likes on Twitter.
There aren’t any telescopes that can clearly take images of planets that far away, hence the images of TOI 1388b were made by a bot. Realistically, that won’t alter in the next fifty years, as one Twitter user stated.
