He was just 15 and had taken a work-experience post at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, when he made the discovery. Wagg found the planet by noting a slight dip in a star’s light as the planet passed before it, according to a university press release.  
     Scientists routinely use this method – watching for the dimming that occurs when a planet passes in front of its host star. Wagg examined images from WASP, the Wide Angle Search for Planets project, which uses cameras to sweep the night skies in search of the exoplanets. 
     Even so, it took two years to confirm Wagg’s findings. He is 17 now. Wagg told the university that he was “hugely excited” to have found a planet.
     For the record, Wagg's planet is about the size of Jupiter. It whips around its star in only two days. It doesn’t have a name yet. But it has the catalog number WASP-142b – as the 142nd discovery by the WASP collaboration, the university’s press release said. The planet is described as a “hot Jupiter.”  Those are “behemoth worlds,” according to NASA, that “orbit close to their parent stars, blocking a fraction of the star’s light when it transits in front.”
     A pupil at Newcastle-under-Lyme School, Wagg is a science enthusiast and wishes to study physics in college. Astronomers throughout the world have found more than 1,000 exoplanets. Indeed, in January, NASA marked the verification of the 1,000th planet spotted by the agency's Kepler Space Telescope. And in April of last year, astronomers examining images from the Hubble Space Telescope discovered evidence of newly formed planets.
     But Keele University noted that Wagg may be the youngest person to have spotted a planet. 

 

     Related:

     NASA marks verification of 1,000th planet

     NASA in Brief -- Astronomers find evidence of new planets 

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