So far, TOI 1338 b is the only known planet in the system. While NASA’s Kepler and K2 missions have previously discovered 12 circumbinary planets, many more of them are expected to be discovered by TESS, the NASA statement said.

There is inarguably plenty of space out there to do so.

“Throughout all of its images, TESS is monitoring millions of stars,” said Adina Feinstein, a graduate student at the University of Chicago who was a co-author of the research paper, in the statement.

TESS’s four cameras, which each capture an image of a patch of sky every 30 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 1338 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 1338 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 1338. The scientists also enlisted a software package called eleanor — 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.