Thanks to the cooperation of a 17-year-old youth, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made the discovery of a planet similar to Earth, located 1,300 light-years away.
This is Wolf Cukier, who began his internship at the Goddard Space Flight Center, the NASA, study after finishing the third year of high school.
His job was, according to the BBC, to examine TESS data, better known as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
What happened on the @Space_Station this week?
🐉 @SpaceX’s Dragon descended from its perch on our orbiting laboratory
👩🚀 @Astro_Christina achieved a spaceflight milestone (300 days in space!)Watch: https://t.co/TByKzJa1hm. Ask questions using #SpaceToGround pic.twitter.com/WvdmQIFtgu
— NASA (@NASA) January 11, 2020
Among the observations made by Cukier, was to analyze how two stars would cross creating an eclipse in the TOI 1338 solar system, it was then that the student realized that something was happening in the orbit of two stars that did not allow the passage of the light.
After these events, NASA experts spent weeks verifying what was found by the 17-year-old and concluded that Cukier had discovered a planet 6.9 times larger than Earth, which has two suns.
“I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had pointed out as a binary that eclipsed a system in which two stars rotate in a circle and from our point of view are eclipsed in each orbit,” Cukier said in a press release issued by NASA.
The project in which the young man works has invited more people without training to join the list of volunteers to see the online transmission of patterns in the brightness of the stars, which could suggest the existence of new new planets.
In addition, the Mexican Space Agency (AEM) launched the call for higher-level Mexican students to conduct ten-week research stay at NASA during the summer of 2020.