High school intern discovers new planet at Maryland's NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

WASHINGTON (WJLA) — A high school student interning at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt this past summer discovered a bit more than how the employees there take their coffee. He discovered a planet.

Wolf Cukier's job, after he finished his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York, was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

TESS has four cameras, which each take a full-frame image of a patch of the sky every 30 minutes for 27 days, NASA says. Scientists use the observations to generate graphs of how the brightness of stars change over time.

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