A 17-year-old intern found a planet orbiting two suns

Wolf Cukier was 17 and three days into a summer internship at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 2019 when he found a planet orbiting two suns. His job was to dig through brightness data from NASA's TESS satellite, looking for anything odd. Something was. He first took it for a stellar eclipse in a distant system called TOI 1338. "But the timing was wrong," Cukier said, per NASA. It was a new planet, about 6.9 times the size of Earth, sitting roughly 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. Now named TOI 1338 b, though some call it Wolftopia after its finder, it circles two stars at once. Cukier landed as a co-author in The Astronomical Journal, among the youngest ever on a NASA discovery. In September 2026, the James Webb Space Telescope turned toward the planet to read its atmosphere. Cukier is now a PhD student at the University of Chicago, still at it.