17-Year-Old NASA Intern Discovers a Planet Orbiting Two Stars

Sometimes the most useful observation is a small mismatch. While examining stellar brightness data during a 2019 summer internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, high-school student Wolf Cukier noticed a dip that did not occur when he expected a stellar eclipse.

The signal helped lead researchers to TOI-1338 b, a planet orbiting two stars. NASA announced the discovery in January 2020. Cukier’s contribution made a memorable story, and the scientific follow-up explains why it became more than an intriguing first impression.

Young researcher beside an illustrated pink gas planet — Wolf Cukier beside an artist’s impression used in the discovery coverage. The planet illustration is not a telescope photograph. Source.

What Cukier saw in the data

The discovery began during Cukier’s 2019 internship at Goddard, and NASA announced it in January 2020. His own account preserves the moment a familiar explanation stopped fitting the measurements:

“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. About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338. At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.”

In the interview carried by the 2021 article, he described checking the wider data and reaching for a Star Wars comparison:

“I noticed a dip, or a transit, from the TOI 1338 system, and that was the first signal of a planet. I first saw the initial dip and thought, 'Oh that looked cool,' but then when I looked at the full data from the telescope at that star, I, and my mentor also noticed, three different dips in the system … I discovered a planet. It has two stars which it orbits around. So, if you think of Luke's homeworld, Tatooine, from 'Star Wars,' it's like that. Every sunset, there's gonna be two stars setting.”

The Tatooine comparison communicates the two-star setting; it is an imaginative analogy rather than a reconstructed view of every sunset. Goddard researcher Veselin Kostov explained the value of human pattern recognition in this particular search:

“These are the types of signals that algorithms really struggle with. The human eye is extremely good at finding patterns in data, especially non-periodic patterns like those we see in transits from these systems.”

At the time of the original interviews, Cukier hoped to study astrophysics at university. That aspiration belongs to the young intern’s story, while the planet’s confirmation belongs to the wider research team and its follow-up work.

In NASA’s January 2020 announcement, the TOI-1338 system was placed about 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. TOI-1338 b was TESS’s first discovered circumbinary planet. That mission milestone does not mean it was the first planet ever found orbiting two stars; earlier discoveries had already established that such worlds exist.

What caught his eye?

Cukier was examining observations from TESS, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, including systems flagged through the Planet Hunters TESS citizen-science project. In NASA’s discovery account, he described noticing the unusual signal about three days into his internship.

The host system contains an eclipsing binary: two stars that periodically cross in front of one another from Earth’s viewpoint. A planet passing across the brighter star can also produce a dip, but its timing does not have to match the stellar eclipses.

That difference was the clue. Researchers then checked the data, tested whether the signals were instrumental artifacts and used additional observations to characterise the system. The discovery was a team result, with Cukier among the paper’s co-authors.

What does “circumbinary” mean?

A circumbinary planet orbits both stars in a binary system. TOI-1338 b does not switch randomly between two suns; its motion belongs to a gravitational arrangement that can be modelled and tested.

Because the stars also move, its transits can vary in timing, depth and duration. The original announcement described intervals of roughly 93–95 days. A changing signal can be harder to recognise than a neat dip repeating at exactly the same interval.

NASA’s discovery estimate placed the planet at about 6.9 times Earth’s radius, between Neptune and Saturn in size. That comparison is about size, not a claim that it has 6.9 times Earth’s mass or an Earth-like surface.

The story gained a second planet

The system did not stop being interesting after its first announcement. NASA’s catalogue lists TOI-1338 c, discovered in 2023 using radial-velocity measurements. That method looks for the effect of an orbiting planet on its host star’s motion.

This later discovery is a useful reminder that an old statement such as “the system’s only known planet” can become outdated while the original discovery story remains true.

The lesson for curious newcomers

Cukier’s experience highlights the value of learning what a normal pattern should look like, then noticing when a measurement departs from it. The next step is verification, supported by people, methods and observations that can test the idea.

If the two-star geometry has caught your imagination, explore TIC 168789840 and its three eclipsing stellar pairs. The sky offers plenty of unusual arrangements; the fun is learning how a few changes in light can reveal them.