TESS' Tatooine discovery
Another first for TESS is its discovery of a planet orbiting two suns, like Tatooine in the Star Wars films. The planet TOI 1338 b was found 1,300 light-years away in the Pictor constellation. It's the only planet in the system with two stars. It's between the sizes of Neptune and Saturn and experiences regular eclipses from its stars. The stars whirl around each other in orbit every 15 days, with one 10% more massive than our sun and the other is more diminutive and cooler. And the planet was found by a high school student. Scarsdale High School student Wolf Cukier was interning for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center over the summer when he spotted something in TESS' star data. "I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars circle around each other and from our view eclipse each other every orbit," Cukier said. "About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338. At first, I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet." Planets with two suns, especially when one is dimmer like in this system, are harder for TESS to detect. Cukier's contribution of examining the star data and the passes of the planet in front of both stars were key to identifying it.DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
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