26/08/2026
Day three of the internship and the kid found a planet.
Wolf Cukier was 17, three days into a summer stint at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, scrolling through TESS data on eclipsing binary stars.
He flagged a dip in brightness and assumed it was one star passing in front of the other.
It wasn't.
It was TOI 1338 b, a world about 6.9 times the size of Earth, sitting 1,300 light years away in the constellation Pictor. Two stars, one planet, orbiting both. The first circumbinary planet TESS ever turned up.
Most interns spend week one figuring out the coffee machine.
