NASA High School Intern Helped Spot TESS’s First Planet Orbiting Two Stars

KEY POINTS

A NASA intern spotted a signal from eclipsing binary TOI 1338 just three days into his internship
At first, he thought the signal was coming from the smaller star passing the larger star
TOI 1338 b is now TESS's first world orbiting two stars
TESS is expected to make more such discoveries during its mission

NASA's TESS mission just uncovered its first planet orbiting two stars. Amazingly, the find was spotted by one of NASA’s high school interns.

TESS’s First World Orbiting Two Stars

Upon finishing his junior year at Scarsdale High School in 2019, Wolf Cuiker joined NASA as a summer intern. While examining data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), particularly the ones volunteered has marked as eclipsing binaries or systems where two stars are circling around each other, he noticed a signal coming from a system called TOI 1338.

At first, Cuiker thought the signal was caused by the smaller star in the system passing the larger one, but the timing was wrong for it to be an eclipse.

Evidently, the signal was actually from a planet, and Cuiker just helped spot TESS’s first world that is orbiting two stars just three days into his internship.

Now called TOI 1338 b, the planet's discovery was featured at a panel discussion at the 235^th American Astronomical Society meeting in Hawaii, and a paper co-authored by Cuiker was already submitted to a scientific journal.

TOI 1338 b

TOI 1338 b lies in the system TOI 1338 1,300 light-years away from the Earth in the constellation Pictor. At 6.9 times larger than the Earth, it is the only known planet in the system where the two stars, one being 10 percent larger than our Sun and the other just a third of our Sun’ mass, are orbiting each other every 15 days.

After identifying TOI 1338 b, the research team created a software package called Eleanor to confirm whether its transits were real or merely a result of instrumental artifacts.

“Throughout all of its images, TESS is monitoring millions of stars,” graduate student at the University of Chicago and co-author of the study Adina Feinstein said. “That's why our team created eleanor. It's an accessible way to download, analyze and visualize transit data. We designed it with planets in mind, but other members of the community use it to study stars, asteroids and even galaxies.”

NASA's Kepler and Kepler 2 missions have previously discovered 12 circumbinary planets, but this is the first for TESS. It is expected to make more of such discoveries during its initial two-year mission.