The Vast Reaches!

American teen found a planet.

An American man discovered a planet that is 1,300 light years away. He's not even 21 years old and he found a planet that is 6.9 larger than Earth on his third day of internship at NASA.

This young Clyde Tombaugh will now etch his legacy as an astronomer.

Wolf Cukier is a 17-year old teenager from New York.

He was at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland where he was doing an internship. He had been trawling through satellite images flagged by members of the public where the brightness of a star seemed to temporarily dip.

Then he spotted something different. An object appeared to be moving in front of the star, blocking its light. Looks like he found himself a planet.

"That's when I noticed at first," Cukier said. "It was like, oh, 'There's something here that was cool.'"

Flagging what he saw to seniors, over the coming days his more experienced colleagues started to see the results of his find and confirmed that Cukier found him a planet.

The vast reaches. A planet that is larger than Earth found by Wolf Cukier.

Handshakes and pictures and now the junk food media asking the teen, "What's it like to be a planet explorer?"

"It's was an amazing, cool bit of serendipity."

The planet hasn't been given a Greek name yet. But so far, the NASA folks call the distant planet TOI 1338 b.

Unlike Earth circling one star which is the Sun, this planet circles two stars every 95 days.

It was the first time that the NASA program he was working on, called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), had discovered a planetary with two stars.

The plans for the future are within reach for the teen. He said once he finishes high school, he may find a place at Stanford, MIT (Massachusetts Institution of Technology) or Princeton.

Wolf Cukier's name will be sealed in history books.

He could eventually go back to NASA and find more planets and satellites. Who knows?

"Future research would involve finding more planets," said Cukier.

In July 2015, NASA's New Horizons had clear images of the dwarf planet Pluto. Located in the Kuiper Belt, Pluto was seen for the first time. The planet and its largest moon Charon were seen with clarity. Also its second moon Nix was seen in 2017.

Pluto has five moons and rotates the Sun within 248.5 years. Pluto and Neptune can't be seen with the naked eye. You would need a telescope to see these objects. Uranus is seen at some point during the night but a telescope is needed.