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Meet TOI 1338 b, the newly identified world orbiting two stars more than 1,300 light years away.
Last July, just after he finished his junior year at Scarsdale High School in Scarsdale, New York, Wolf started an internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. His job was to scrutinize data that had been beamed back from outer space by TESS, or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
During the first week of the internship, as he sifted through data that had been flagged by citizen-scientists, he zeroed in on a system that included two orbiting stars. He identified a body in that system that was later verified as a planet about 6.9 times as large as Earth. His colleagues gave the system a name, TOI 1338, an acronym for TESS Object of Interest, and then called the planet TOI 1338 b.
Any dip in the brightness of a single star is a good indication that a planet has crossed in front of it. But TOI 1338 b was particularly elusive because it involved two stars — a large star where the planet’s transit was easy to detect, and a smaller one where the planet’s transit was so small it was not observable.
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That was where Wolf came in. He initially thought the transit that was later identified as belonging to TOI 1338 b was the smaller star passing in front of the larger one. But the timing seemed off for an eclipse, and Wolf suspected there might be the existence of a planet.
Wolf consulted on his find with his mentor, and a verification process began using archival data that later became known as TOI 1338.
Wolf plans to study astrophysics when he starts college in September, he said. He said he was humbled by his contribution to the discovery of the new world, emphasizing the team work in the verification process.
“We identified a promising candidate,” he said. “You can’t be arrogant. It is a planet, insofar as we can claim any other exoplanet, pretty much.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .