How a 17-year-old NASA intern spotted an odd signal in telescope data and found a planet with two suns

Most 17-year-olds spend their summers lifeguarding or scrolling their phones. Wolf Cukier was looking at data from a telescope at NASA. In those long hours of staring at brightness charts, somewhere he saw something that didn’t look right, and it turned out to be a planet orbiting not one but two stars.

This was not a movie. This was a real high school junior from Scarsdale, New York, doing the kind of careful, unglamorous work that most people never hear about, sitting at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the summer of 2019. But the discovery? It was big news everywhere.

What he was actually looking for
Cukier's job, on paper, was pretty easy. He was sifting through data from NASA’s TESS mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, from eclipsing binary systems, looking for dips in starlight that indicate an object crossing in front of a star. A standard but painstaking task in exoplanet hunting.


Just three days into the internship, he notices a signal that wouldn't behave.

The TOI 1338 system did not behave like most eclipsing binaries do, where the stars fade in a predictable, regular pattern as they pass in front of one another. This one was irregular, messy, peculiar enough to make him do a double-take.

Circumbinary systems, where a planet orbits two stars rather than orbiting a single star, can cause irregular dips that are not typical of standard planetary transits. A human eye can see and immediately prioritize what a model cannot, and in this case, the human eye was that of a teenage summer intern.

NASA turned a hunch into a real find
To see something strange is one thing. Proving it was a planet was another thing. And that’s when the real science began.
Cukier is a co-author on the paper, published in The Astronomical Journal, that describes the discovery of TOI-1338 b, the first circumbinary planet discovered by the TESS mission. The planet circles in a near-circular orbit every roughly 95.2 days, a period the team confirmed with not one data set, but both TESS photometry and ground-based radial velocity data.

That is what makes a good anomaly a true discovery. Along with other missions, TESS sends down thousands of signals a year. Most don’t make it past the ‘interesting’ phase. This one did.

NASA’s public records show the discovery was presented shortly thereafter at the American Astronomical Society meeting, and official internship highlights from 2019 show how quickly a student-led observation can move from the desk to the scientific record.

Why is a two-sun planet a big deal
If you love Star Wars, you must have some picture in your mind of what this looks like. Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, watching a double sunset. That is TOI 1338 b for you.

NASA has classified TOI 1338 b as a Neptune-like world, with an orbital period of about 95.2 days. It is a cataloged object with a known orbit and a confirmed place in the mission’s history. Not some nebulous blip in the middle of deep space. This is a real planet, with real data to back it up.

For the record, it was not the first circumbinary planet ever found in the universe, but it was the first one ever found by TESS, and that milestone is partly the work of a high schooler in New York.

What this means for the next generation of space lovers
This wasn’t a discovery made by some old PhD veteran with decades of experience on their back. It was made by an observant kid.
That is not feel-good spin; that is exactly how modern astronomy works. TESS takes a huge amount of data. Trained and curious human eyes are still part of the data-to-knowledge process. Cukier’s mentors looked over his work, crunched the numbers, and made the formal case, bt he was the one who started it all.

This is a story worth sitting with if you are a young person who has felt like science was something that happened to other people, in other places, with bigger credentials. Sometimes the discovery starts with one person not ignoring something weird.