Teen Discovers Planet on Day Three of Internship with NASA

طالب ثانوية يكتشف كوكباً جديداً في اليوم الثالث لتدريبه مع ناسا

Call it luck, but not “dumb luck.”

Just three days into Wolf Cukier’s summer internship with 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 our solar system.

“I was pretty much spending my summer looking at graphs on 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 was confident it 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 10 asterisks next to this one, saying this one looks good, we should look at this one first.”

The planet is 1,300 light years from Earth.

What Cukier had found was evidence of changes in the light of the two stars, called binary stars. The way scientists “see” such a distant planet is by changes in light. If a planet is moving between the telescope and the star it orbits, it produces an effect similar to an eclipse that we see here on Earth.

In other words, the planet blocks some of the sun’s light from the telescope. In graphs and other data, this shows up as a dip — a line that moves down and then up again.

Later that day, Cukier met with his boss, Veselin Kostov, to go over his find.

The high school student was working with a team of scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C.

NASA has about 2,000 interns across the country each year.

Kostov told VOA that Cukier came into his office and told him he had something that “looks interesting.”

It was “a really exciting couple of hours” to make sure what they saw “was real,” Kostov said.

“Once we were pretty confident that they were mostly real, we reached out to the rest of the team,” Kostov said. Other team members found more transits of the planet, giving them more evidence.

Because the planet is so big, NASA scientists believe it is made of gas, like Saturn or Jupiter. Even if it had been rocky, like Earth, the planet seems to be too close to one of the stars to be able to support life.

A team of NASA scientists, including Cukier, submitted the finding to a scientific journal. The work will be published soon.

Reading scientific journals in his classes at Scarsdale High School in New York is what brought Cukier to his internship at NASA. Under the supervision of two high school teachers, he and other students in the program study a science field of their choice. Cukier settled on the field of astrobiology.

He contacted people at NASA to help him gain an internship. While at NASA in the summer of 2018, he studied “Goldilocks” zones—planets that have conditions that could support life.

NASA invited Cukier back the following summer. And that is when he found the planet.

NASA’s Kostov holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University. Both he and Cukier have advice for students wanting to study the stars. First, study physics and math.

Other than that, Cukier says it was both luck and “putting in the hard work” that led to his discovery.

“Yes what I did is impressive, but it also didn’t take that many special skills. So, if someone is interested in science, like my age, and even if they don’t have training, they should still just reach out to researchers and find something that they can do because almost anyone can look through data looking for dips.

“It just happened to be me, who saw this one.”

Since the news broke earlier this month, Cukier has told his story to many media organizations. He says that even though it has been fun, the attention is a “bit overwhelming.”

As for his future, Cukier plans to study either physics or astrophysics in college. He hopes to attend Stanford, Princeton or M.I.T., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology next autumn.

But first comes his high school graduation this spring.

source: learningenglish.voanews.com

أوردت صحيفة “واشنطن بوست” تقريراً عن اكتشاف طالب ثانوية أميركي لكوكب جديد في اليوم الثالث من فترته التدريبية مع وكالة ناسا الفضائية. وقالت الصحيفة إن الطالب “وولف كويكر” البالغ من العمر 17 عاماً استطاع اكتشاف كوكب يدور حول نجمين بعد أن تلقى توجيهات بسيطة من مشرفه في التدريب.

الكوكب الذي اكتشفه “كويكر” بات يعرف علمياً باسم “TOI 1338 b”، ويبلغ حجمه تقريباً 7 أضعاف حجم الأرض، ويدور حول نجمين أحدهما أكبر من الشمس بقليل بينما يبلغ حجم الآخر ثلث حجم الشمس. 

ويوضح التقرير أن “كويكر” قضى سابقاً فترة تدريبية في مختبر خاص بأبحاث الفضاء تشرف عليه وكالة ناسا. إذ شارك خلال صيف عام 2018 في مشروع للبحث عن كواكب تشابه ظروفها كوكب الأرض، وبالتالي يمكن أن يوجد بها ماء وحياة. 

ودُعي”كويكر” لفترة تدريبية أخرى مع “ناسا”، إذ تعرف للمرة الأولى على البرنامج الذي سيمكنه من التوصل إلى هذا الاكتشاف. فكما يقول مشرفه الذي لم يدرب طالب ثانوية من قبل حسب ما أورد التقرير: “أعطيته تعليمات بسيطة حول ما نفعله، وقد تعلم كل شيء بنفسه، إنه يتعلم بسرعة ويحصل فهماً عميقاً للمجال”. 

واكتشف “كويكر” الكوكب الجديد باستخدام برنامج لمراقبة الفلك يعرف اختصاراً باسم “TESS” وهو برنامج معقد يستخدمه العلماء في اكتشاف الفضاء. إلا أن “كويكر” كان قد تعامل مع برنامج مشابه متاح لمحبي الفلك يعرف باسم “Planet Hunter’s Tess”

وعمل “كويكر” مع مشرفه لساعات طويلة حتى يتم تأكيد الاكتشاف رسمياً، وتم تأكيده بعد عدة أشهر. ولم يفلح “كويكر” في اطلاق اسم مستعار على الكوكب، و أوكل المهمة لأخيه الذي سماه “Wolftopia”