Did you know summer internships are very important for high-school students? Especially for those that are aiming at applying to competitive and high-ranking universities and colleges.

Of course, not every internship can make you successful or well-known overnight, but this is exactly the case in our story today. Imagine being part of a NASA summer internship program and you happen to discover a whole new planet. Really can it be more prestigious than that?

Meet Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old high school student from New York who joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt back in the summer of 2019. His internship involved examining variations in star brightness, captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, also known as TESS.

Well, this genius boy just on the third day in his new position, discovered a whole planet around 1,300 light-years away from earth. As Wolf explained to CNN, ” I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338b. At first, I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet”.

When Wolf first noticed the new planet he didn’t really know what he was looking at, as he later explained to the NBC 4 NY, “I first saw the initial dip and thought, ‘Oh that looked cool,’ but then when I looked at the full data from the telescope at that star, I and my mentor also noticed, three different dips in the system”. And these “dips” were the initial signs of the planet and of its two stars.

The newly discovered planet, now known as TOI 1388b, is the first circumbinary planet found by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Circumbinary means that this planet orbits two stars instead of one. TOI 1338b together with its two stars make up what is called an “eclipsing binary”.

According to NASA, the new planet is 6.9 times larger than Earth, which means its size varies between the sizes of Neptune and Saturn. Recently NASA released the first pictures of TOI 1388b and they are absolutely mesmerizing. It’s not surprising that the pictures of this new planet have gone viral!

These generated images are not actually real photos but they were produced by a bot, as NASA doesn’t have telescopes capable of reaching this kind of distance. The generated pictures seem totally zen-like in pastel colors like pink and lavender that urge you to keep looking at them. The photos were released on Twitter and the internet literally broke! The post containing the pictures were retweeted more than 224K times and the original post received more than 1 million likes.

Wolf said to CNBC that his top 3 university choices are Princeton, MIT, and Stanford, well, after a discovery like that, undoubtedly he could be more relaxed with his college applications as it’s not every day that high-school students like him discover new planets!

When news like the discovery of new planets is released it really makes you wonder about what there is really out there. Are we really alone in this galaxy or solar system? Or there are more living being somewhere that might resemble us more than we could ever have imagined. Maybe in a few hundreds of years like in the sci-fi films, the future generations will be able to travel around the galaxy and even colonize some of the planets.

If you would like to watch the whole news report, check out the video below!

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Source: CNBC, BoredPanda