A 15-year-old schoolboy has discovered a new planet orbiting a star 1,000 light years away in our galaxy. Tom Wagg was doing work-experience at Keele University in the U.K. when he spotted the planet by finding a tiny dip in the light of a star as a planet passed in front of it.
"I'm hugely excited to have a found a new planet, and I'm very impressed that we can find them so far away," said Wagg, now 17. It has taken two years of further observations to prove that his discovery really is a planet.
Waggs found the planet by looking at data collected by the WASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) project, which surveys the night skies monitoring millions of stars to look for the tell-tale tiny dips (transits) caused by planets passing in front of their host star.
The planet has been given the catalog number WASP-142b, being 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, Wagg is possibly the youngest ever to have done so, according to a press release.
The planet is the same size as Jupiter, but orbits its star in only two days. With such a short orbital period the transits occur frequently, making such planets much easier to find. The hemisphere facing the star is hot, blasted by the irradiation from the star, while the other hemisphere is much cooler.
The planet is one of a class of "hot Jupiter" planets, which - unlike the planets in our own solar system - have very tight orbits close to their stars. They are thought to have migrated inwards through interactions with another planet. It is likely that Wagg's planet is not the only planet orbiting that star, according to the press release.
The planet does not yet have a name, though the International Astronomical Union has started a contest to name extra-solar planets.
