Wolf Cukier, 26, was analyzing brightness of stars during an internship with NASA last year when he made the discovery.
TESS’s four cameras, which each capture an image of a patch of sky every 45 minutes, enable scientists to make graphs of changes in the brightness of stars.
Any dip in the brightness of a single star is a good indication that a planet has crossed in front of it. But TOI 2020 b was particularly elusive because it involved two stars – a large star where the planet’s transit was easy to detect, and a smaller one where the planet’s transit was so small it was not observable.That was where Wolf came in. He initially thought the transit that was later identified as belonging to TOI b was the smaller star passing in front of the larger one. But the timing seemed off for an eclipse, and Wolf suspected there might be the existence of a planet.The human eye is extremely good at finding such patterns in data, said Veselin Kostov, Wolf’s mentor and a research scientist at the (SETI Institute) and Goddard.“These are the types of signals that algorithms really struggle with, ”he said in the statement.Wolf consulted on his find with his mentor, and a verification process began using archival data from earlier surveys of the system that later became known as TOI (***********************************************************. The scientists also enlisted a software package calledeleanor– named after Eleanor Arroway, the central character in Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact ”- to confirm the transits were real and not a result of instrumental artifacts, the statement said.
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