15-year-old Tom Wagg, a student at Newcastle-under-Lyme School in Britain, spotted a new planet as he was combing the data collected by Keele University’s WASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) project, which scans millions of stars in night skies and searches for tiny dips, or transits, caused by the passing of planets, during his 7-day internship at Keel University in 2013.
The university took two years to verify his findings. Invisible to the naked eye and 1,000 light years away, the new planet is about the size of Jupiter and has been labeled with the catalog number WASP-142b as it’s the 142nd discovery by the WASP collaboration. It is in the Southern constellation of Hydra. While astronomers worldwide have now found over 1000 extra-solar planets, Tom is possibly the youngest ever to have done so.
“I’m hugely excited to have a found a new planet and I’m very impressed that we can find them so far away. The WASP software was impressive, enabling me to search through hundreds of different stars, looking for ones that have a planet,” he said in a statement.
While undertaking work experience at the university, Tom noticed a tiny dip in the light of a star as a planet passed in front of it.
“It was just my third day when I spotted what looked a good [planet] candidate, but I had already gone through more than 1,000 sets of data by then. It looks boring, but when you think about what you’re actually doing it’s amazing really,” he told BBC.
The newly-discovered planet falls into a class of exoplanets called hot Jupiter planets, which – unlike the planets in our own Solar System – have very tight orbits close to their host stars. They are thought to have migrated inwards through interactions with another planet. Thus it is likely that Tom’s planet is not the only planet orbiting that star.
The planet does not yet have a name, though the International Astronomical Union has started a contest to name extra-solar planets.
Source:
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/11/europe/intern-discovers-planet/index.html
