ELY: A teenager on work experience during his week-long placement at Keele University discovered a new planet 1000 light years away.
Tom Wagg was 15 when he spotted a tiny dip in the light of a distant star during his placement at Keele University.
And now almost after two years of further research scientists gave a confirmation that Wagg witnessed a mystery planet passing in front of the star.
As per scientists, the new planet is located at such a far distant that it cannot be directly seen through a telescope, but is thought to be about the same size as Jupiter, orbiting its star every two days.
The planet is located in the constellation of Hydra at the southern end of the Milky Way, and orbits its star every two days.
Wagg, now 17, said, “It’s really exciting. I was amazed. It’s definitely something you can tell people about. It’s a gas planet and is known as a ‘hot Jupiter’. As it’s so close to a star, there could be other planets around it”.
The confirmation of the discovery makes Tom Wagg the youngest person to have ever found a new planet.
It has been catalogued as Wasp-142b as it is the 142nd to be discovered by the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project.
The Wasp consortium also involves scientists from the Universities of Warwick, Cambridge and St Andrews, working with scientists in Switzerland, France and Belgium.
Tom said he liked stargazing to looking back in time, because the stars are so far away from Earth we see them as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago.
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