Call it luck, but not dumbluck. Just three days into Wolf Cukier’s summerinternshipwith the American space agency NASA, he found a new planet. The 17 year old high school student was tasked with looking through data from a telescope in search of evidence of planets outside oursolar system. I was pretty much spending my summer looking atgraphson a computer screen. And on his third day with NASA, Cukier found it, a previously unknown planet orbiting two stars. Cukier was looking at data produced by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS. Although he did not see the physical planet, he saw clear evidence of it. I couldn't say that I wasconfidentit was a planet because it was day three on the job. And I couldn't say anything with confidence quite yet. But out of the hundred different targets that I looked at, I remember I put about 10asterisksnext to this one, saying this one looks good, we should look at this one first. The planet is 1,300 light years from Earth.
