The idea of a planet orbiting two suns sounds like science fiction. More specifically, it’s an idea from Star Wars: the fictional planet Tatooine famously has two suns. But in real life? Scientists long thought that was impossible.

However, in 2011, the first “circumbinary” planet, as it’s called, was discovered. In the following years, astronomers confirmed more and more. But scientists still didn’t understand much about this rare phenomenon.

In 2019, a new planet with two suns was discovered by an unexpected scientist

Wolf Cukier was just a high school junior when he began a summer internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2019.

Simply put, he was a data jockey. His job was to dig through extensive data on variations in star brightness captured by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).

On just his third day looking through the data, Cukier noticed........

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