A High School Intern Found a Planet Orbiting Two Stars in the TOI 1338 System
A high school summer intern for NASA was able to find a planet that orbits two stars. Wolf Cukier was working as an intern for NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland when he noticed some interesting data about star brightness observed by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite in the TOI 1338 system.
“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.”
The planet has been named TOI 1338 b and is the only known planet in the system that’s tucked away in the Pictor constellation. It is roughly 6.9 times larger than Earth and revolves around its two stars every 93-94 days.
The two stars that TOI 1338 b orbits are very different. One is roughly 10% larger than our Sun while the other is about 1/3 the size of the Sun. The stars also have different brightness and heat; the smaller one is both cooler and dimmer.
This discovery is so freaking cool. I start to wonder what life on a planet would be like. Would it be similar to what we see for Tatooine in Star Wars? Is it the opposite? I can’t help but wonder what TOI 1338 b is like and if it would at all be possible for us to live there someday. Heck, maybe there’s life there. That’d be a trip.