Call it luck, but not dumb luck. Just three days into Wolf Cukier’s summer internship with the American space agency NASA, he found a new planet. The 17-year-old high school student was tasked with looking through data from a telescope in search of evidence of planets outside our solar system. “I was pretty much spending my summer looking at graphs on a computer screen.” And on his third day with NASA, Cukier found it: a previously unknown planet orbiting two stars. Cukier was looking at data produced by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS. Although he did not see the physical planet, he saw clear evidence of it. “I couldn't say that I was confident it was a planet because it was day three on the job. And I couldn't say anything with confidence quite yet.”

What was the student looking at?
a telescope
planets
stars
data
What does dumb luck mean?
find a new planet
looking at graphs
happen by chance
previously unknown
He saw clear evidence of a planet.
a new star
satellite surveys
a planet
a computer screen