Kamal Ghorui
Imagine starting a summer job and, within seventy-two hours, finding something that has been hiding in the vastness of space for billions of years. For most teenagers, a summer internship involves filing papers or grabbing coffee, but seventeen-year-old Wolf Cukier spent his 2019 summer break quite differently. While working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, he sat down at a computer to look at data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, also known as TESS. By the time his first week was over, he had uncovered a real-life version of the fictional planet Tatooine.It was not a sudden revelation in a movie-style “aha” moment, but the result of diligent effort, which constitutes the core of all scientific processes. Cukier’s task was analysing light curves – graphs depicting fluctuations in the brightness of the star in question. A decrease in brightness typically means that there is something between the observer and the object of study blocking a significant amount of its light. While others might notice only data points and lines on graphs, Cukier saw that the anomaly in question appeared at an unusual point in time, marking the beginning of the discovery of TOI-1338 b.Disrupting the dance of the starsThe difficulty of this observation was compounded by the peculiarity of the system itself. Usually, planets move around a single star, creating predictable shadow cycles. In the case of TOI-1338 b, we have a circumbinary planet – one that moves around two suns. Since the movement of those two suns itself is cyclical, it causes constant shifting of the times when the transit can be observed.As detailed in the research paper titled TOI-1338: TESS First Transiting Circumbinary Planet, the system is located about 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. The two stars at the centre are different sizes; one is about ten per cent more massive than our own sun, while the other is much cooler and dimmer. The planet itself is a giant, measuring roughly seven times the size of Earth. Because it orbits both stars, its transits are irregular in both timing and duration.
This discovery paved the way for identifying a second planet in the same system, highlighting the crucial role of human observation in scientific breakthroughs. Representative Image. Image Credit: Google Gemini
Initially, when Cukier saw the data, he felt that it could be an eclipse, as expected in binary stars. However, a careful observation showed an anomaly in the periodogram. Instead of labelling the phenomenon as a glitch, Cukier adhered to the scientific process and highlighted the “incorrect” dip. By doing so, he managed to assemble a large contingent of researchers from multiple organisations to support his findings, which proved to be a clear win for an astute student in a field that demands rigorous proof.A scientific finding that doesn’t stop thereTOI-1338 b was not a one-off discovery that would have made the news and been forgotten afterwards. The accidental discovery made by a teenager gave rise to many more significant discoveries in the future. The easy identification of the initial planet led to increased vigilance on the part of scientists working in the field. After years of searching, the researchers discovered another planet in the same system and published their findings in Nature Astronomy.The second planet, referred to as TOI-1338 c or BEBOP-1c, has been discovered by using the radial velocity technique. It entails measuring the minute changes caused in the velocity of a star due to the gravitational force exerted by the planets that revolve around it. The discovery of the second planet in this binary configuration was extremely rare, and the system thus emerged as an excellent test-bed for studying planetary formation in such complicated systems.For NASA, this was a milestone moment. It proved that the TESS mission was capable of finding the most difficult types of planets, even in data that seemed messy or irregular. It also served as a powerful reminder that human attention still matters in an age of artificial intelligence. Computers are great at following rules, but humans are great at noticing when a rule has been broken.In today’s times, it is still one of the best discoveries in science due to its relevance to both history and the present-day world. The Earth moved along a path revolving around two stars for billions of years, unnoticed by any individual, until an adolescent decided to look into an anomaly of light fluctuations that were beyond expectations. It is a lesson for everyone: the greatest changes start when we pay attention to events happening at the wrong time.
