在美国宇航局实习的斯卡斯代尔少年，发现新行星

在美国宇航局实习的斯卡斯代尔少年，发现新行星

A teenage whiz kid from the New York suburbs needed just three days at a NASA internship to pull off something out of this world — discover a brand new planet.

一个来自纽约郊区的十几岁的神童,在NASA实习三天就完成了一件事——发现了一个全新的星球。

Wolf Cukier, a 17-year-old senior at Scarsdale High School, was doing a summer internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland over the summer when he made the cosmic discovery using the space agency’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, NASA said.

据美国宇航局介绍，17岁的沃尔夫·库基尔是斯卡斯代尔高中的一名大四学生。今年夏天，他在马里兰州NASA戈达德太空飞行中心实习时，利用NASA的凌日系外行星勘测卫星(简称TESS)发现了这一宇宙现象。

“There’s a whole bunch of things that also looked like planets when I was searching,” Cukier told The Post Wednesday. “It took some time to actually verify that this was a bonafide planet and not the telescope shaking or something.”

周三，库基尔告诉《华盛顿邮报》:“当我搜索的时候，有很多东西看起来也像行星。”“我们花了一些时间来证实这是一颗真正的行星，而不是望远镜震动之类的。”

“When I first found it, it was among 100 other things I flagged to start,” he said. “I do think I put like 10 asterisks next to it. I thought it looked pretty good compared to the rest of the things I saw.”

他说:“当我第一次发现它的时候，它是我想要开始做的100件事情之一。”“我觉得我在它旁边加了10个星号。我觉得和我看到的其他东西相比，它看起来很不错。”

Cukier’s find is TESS’ first circumbinary planet — a celestial object that orbits two stars. The discovery was announced at the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu Monday.

库基尔的发现是TESS发现的第一颗绕双星运行的天体。这一发现于周一在檀香山举行的第235届美国天文学会会议上宣布。

He said he landed the internship after he “sent a bunch of emails to random researchers at different institutions.”

他说，他是在“给不同机构的随机研究员发了一堆电子邮件”之后得到这份实习工作的。

“One of them said ‘I can’t take you but I can refer you to someone who might be able to take you,” he said. Enter NASA.

“其中一人说，‘我不能带你去，但我可以把你介绍给可能带你去的人，’”他说。就这样，他进入了美国宇航局。

However, the Princeton-bound teen doesn’t get to name his discovery.

然而，这个前往普林斯顿的少年并没有给他的发现命名。

“New planets discovered by TESS get a TOI number if they don’t have another significant name already,” he said.

他说:“TESS发现的新行星如果没有另外一个重要的名字，就会得到《印度时报》的编号。”

Nor does he know what he would name it — although his brother insists “’Wolftopia’” would be pretty cool.”

他也不知道自己会给它起什么名字——尽管他的哥哥坚持认为“狼国”会很酷。

Cukier found his planet in a binary star system called TOI 1338, which lies inside a constellation about 1,300 light-years from Earth.

库基尔发现的这颗行星是一个名为TOI 1338的双星系统，它位于距离地球1300光年的一个星座内。

Now called TOI 1338 b, it is the only known planet within the system — and the first planet discovered by TESS.

它现在被称为TOI 1338b，是太阳系中唯一已知的行星——也是TESS发现的第一颗行星。