When A NASA Intern Noticed A Strange Blip On His Screen, Experts Realized He’d Found Something Big

It’s probably fair to say that Wolf Cukier’s dreams are coming true. The 17-year-old is only three days into his internship with NASA, but already he’s on the brink of something big. Tirelessly analyzing satellite photos of space, he notices something strange: a kind of blip in the imagery. It could be nothing, but this savvy teen senses he might be looking at something extraordinary. He takes the image to his superiors, and this is where things start to get interesting: the kid has found something truly monumental.

Despite only being a few days into a work placement set to last for two months, Cukier has already announced himself as an astronomer of the future. His mentors asked him to study imagery taken with a sophisticated telescope known as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). But they hardly could’ve expected him to come up with results so quickly.

According to NASA, the TESS telescope represents a clear effort to locate potentially life-sustaining planets beyond the Earth. The satellite was sent to space back in 2018, with the intention that it would survey great swathes of our galaxy. Basically, TESS examines the light emitted from distant stars. If there are discrepancies in how this light travels, then it might be that an undiscovered planet is blocking it. And maybe such a planet could bear signs of life.

Intern Cukier was asked to cast an eye over some of the images from TESS, paying particular attention to the light from stars. He was obviously the right person for the job, because he noticed something quickly. Yes, he astutely realized that something was obstructing the view of a particular couple of stars. And he knew that this might have been an important observation.

When Cukier told his NASA superiors about what he’d noticed in the image, they took the young man seriously. They decided to take a look at his discovery, which was a great choice. The teenager, it turned out, really had found something to get excited about.

Unsurprisingly for someone who volunteered to intern at NASA, Cukier has been fascinated by outer space for as long as he can remember. So it’s easy to imagine how exciting this experience must have been for him. All throughout his childhood, he’d been learning about astronomy. So when he got his opportunity to make a contribution to the field, he certainly didn’t waste it.

In February 2020 the website Space.com spoke to Cukier for an article about his discovery. During this interview, the young man gave some background on how his great interest in science developed in the first place. From his point of view, it was his mother who instilled this passion in him.

Cukier told Space.com, “I’ve probably always been interested in science. My mom is trained as a geologist. She passed that love of science down to me… when I was in middle school, whenever we would get on a plane to go somewhere, my mom would get me a science magazine to read, and I think reading those helped pique my interest even more in science and, in particular, astronomy. And [science] just kind of always has been interesting to me.”

As he got a little older, Cukier finally got the opportunity to take his interest in space to the next level. In 2018 the teenager secured an internship with NASA, before getting another one the year after that. It’s fair to say, then, that from a young age he’s put himself in a good position to establish a career in astronomy.

Speaking to Space.com, Cukier explained how he secured his work placement. He said, “As part of my school, I signed up for the science research program, which basically provides a support structure for kids interested in doing research to find a mentor in order to start doing research. So, as part of this program, students are required to find a mentor, like an actual trained scientist or engineer in the field that they’re interested in to provide a project and help them through it.”

Cukier got in contact with a number of experts to ask if they’d take him on as a sort of apprentice. And in 2018 a NASA researcher named Ravi Kopparapu replied to the teenager, agreeing to take him on for some work experience. The next year, when Cukier was looking for a second stint, it was Veselin Kostov who agreed to become his mentor.

As Cukier remembers it, the internship in 2018 was very focused on theory. He was tasked with trying to work out the range of distances from a star in which it’s possible for a planet to sustain life. More specifically, Cukier was trying to work out this distance – known as a habitable zone – in relation to planets that orbit around two stars, as opposed to just one.

It sounds like complicated stuff, but Cukier obviously showed off his abilities during this first internship. After all, he was welcomed back to NASA for more work experience just a year or so later. This in itself was quite a significant achievement, as not every intern that shows up to work at the agency is so highly regarded.

Perhaps the most notorious of the problematic NASA interns is Thad Roberts, who joined the agency when he was 25. All in all, things were looking promising for Roberts at that time. He was studying physics, anthropology and geology back then, so this NASA work placement must have been the icing on the cake. But then he risked everything by doing something stupid.

Roberts had a wife at this time, but he nonetheless fell in love with fellow NASA intern Tiffany Fowler. So he took it upon himself to impress her. And the best way to woo this girl, he reasoned, was to rob some space rocks from NASA. What could go wrong?

Now, NASA possesses hundreds of pounds of rock taken from the Moon. These boulders are extremely valuable, so the agency obviously stores them away carefully. Unperturbed, Roberts suggested to his crush Fowler that the two of them try to steal some. As things turned out, she was a perfectly willing and able accomplice.

Roberts and Fowler managed to break into a NASA facility that was storing some of these moon rocks. There was a problem, though, because these boulders were stored in a room that didn’t contain any oxygen. This was to simulate the lunar environment and therefore protect the rocks’ integrity, but it was obviously an issue for the wannabe thieves. Except that they were prepared: the two of them donned space suits to allow them to breathe. Then they waltzed inside and got their hands on some moon rocks.

The rocks that Roberts and Fowler had stolen were reportedly worth around $21 million. And it initially looked like they might get away with their heist. NASA had no idea what had happened, but then it asked the FBI to investigate. And it wasn’t long before it started to close in on the thieves.

Roberts had tried to sell the moon rocks online – and the FBI found out about it. The feds then set up a sting operation, pretending that they were interested in buying the rocks and organizing a meeting with Roberts. The NASA intern fell for the ploy and was taken into custody. He was later sentenced to spend eight years in jail.

Thad Roberts probably lies at the more extreme end of NASA intern disasters, but there are others too. In 2018, for instance, a story made the news about a girl who ended up losing her placement at the agency. The whole dramatic debacle came about because of an ill-judged tweet.

This person had obviously been very excited when she was accepted as a NASA intern, so she took to Twitter to express her joy. Unfortunately, she did so in a pretty explicit way. The celebratory tweet contained a profanity, and one commenter called her out on it. The would-be intern then replied to this person with even stronger words.

The thing was, though, that the individual who’d replied to the initial tweet was actually a senior official. And this girl had been decidedly rude to him. He replied to her, plainly, with, “I am on the National Space Council that oversees NASA.” One can only imagine how the girl must have felt upon reading that.

After this thread blew up online, the girl changed her Twitter account so that her posts were hidden from the public. Plus the senior NASA official also took down his tweets. He, apparently, had never wanted the girl to get in trouble for her posts – but it was no good. She lost her place at NASA.

The girl reportedly apologized to the NASA official, and he was happy to accept it. He later publicly explained that he had never wanted her to lose her placement and that the decision had been out of his hands. But he would try to help this girl out in future, in the hope that she could secure a similar position to the one she’d lost.

So there have been some truly disastrous internships at NASA. In fact, this last girl didn’t even get to start her new job before it was taken away from her again. Bearing all this in mind, then, we can see just how impressive a trainee Wolf Cukier really was when he got started at the agency.

After all, Cukier made his mark at the agency almost immediately after starting his second stint as an intern. He was still a high-school student at the time, but he was nonetheless given an interesting job to do. Basically, he had to look at imagery of distant stars in the galaxy to see if they might provide hints of the existence of undiscovered planets.

This task relied heavily on light. Basically, if the light of a star appeared to be blocked by something, then that might suggest that a planet was orbiting it. So when Cukier examined some images from TESS and noticed this exact effect, he quickly told his NASA colleagues about it.

Cukier recalled this moment in a NASA statement. He said, “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. 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.”

The teenager’s interest was thoroughly piqued, so he informed his superiors to see what they thought. And as it happened, they seemed to think the kid was on to something. More senior researchers took a look at the imagery and discovered that Cukier really had found something remarkable. He’d discovered a planet.

This planet has been designated as TOI 1338 b. It’s definitely not the snappiest of names, but sadly Cukier doesn’t get a hand in giving it a better one. As he told the BBC in January 2020, “I don’t get to name the planet. My brother had the idea of calling it Wolftopia, but I think TOI 1338 b is sufficient.”

TOI 1338 b is remarkable for another reason besides the circumstances of its discovery. That’s because it’s a “circumbinary planet,” which refers to the fact that it orbits not one, but two stars. Star Wars aficionados might be familiar with this concept, as Tatooine is an example of such a planet.

Cukier spoke about this to the BBC. He explained, “[TOI 1338 b is] very much like Tatooine; at least how the stars would appear in the sky. So, it would also have a double sunset.” Aside from that similarity, though, Tatooine and TOI 1338 b do have a major difference. That is, in the movies, Tatooine can sustain life. In real life, TOI 1338 most certainly can’t.

A part of a constellation known as Pictor, TOI 1338 b is located around 1,300 light-years from the Earth. It’s almost seven times as big as our planet, which makes it comparable to Saturn or Neptune. The two stars that it orbits have very different masses, with one being more massive than our own Sun and the other being far less so.

Circumbinary planets can actually prove to be really problematic entities to find from Earth. In fact, contemporary astronomical technology can really struggle to locate them, so sometimes a little old-fashioned human analysis is necessary. Researcher Veselin Kostov, who served as Cukier’s supervisor, elaborated on this point in a NASA statement.

Kostov explained that circumbinary planets give off data that algorithms have trouble processing. In his words, “These are the types of signals that algorithms really struggle with… The human eye is extremely good at finding patterns in data, especially non-periodic patterns like those we see in transits from these systems.”

And thankfully for Kostov and his team, Cukier was alert to the signs of a circumbinary planet and managed to identify one. It was quite the discovery to make, one that apparently impressed the NASA team. As Cukier remarked to the BBC, “My mentor has been very supportive and excited. I think NASA is surprised with the amount of attention this has been getting.”

This story was reported on all over the world, meaning that Cukier became something of a celebrity. He spoke to Space.com about the impact of that, stating, “It’s a bit intimidating. And overwhelming. It’s kind of weird. I went to the store the other day, and the cashier asked me, ‘Were you on the news?’ and [I answered], ‘Yes I was!’ That’s not an exchange I expected… I never expected it to get this big.”

After all this, then, does the young man envision working in a field related to the study of space? Well, he plans to first finish up with high school and then to go to college. As he remarked to the BBC, “When I’m there I’m planning to study physics and astrophysics. From there, a career in space research is appealing.”

Until that time could arrive, though, Cukier had to go back to complete high school. And when he did go back, he found that he’d developed quite the reputation. He told the BBC, “I’ve had more congratulations over the past four days than I’ve had over the past couple of years combined. Everybody is incredibly excited. It’s a surreal experience.”

It’s quite the story, and it all came about because Cukier had the confidence to follow his aspirations. It’s a positive attitude for a young person to have, and he encourages others to take on a similar outlook. Speaking to Space.com, he said, “I would just tell people to reach out and don’t be afraid of people saying ‘no.’ People will say ‘no,’ but all you need is one ‘yes.’”