This 15-year-old discovered a new planet on his third day of work

Tom Wagg
(Image credit: Twitter)

Teens do the darndest things. When they're not ingesting dangerous amounts of cinnamon and filming the results or incessantly sending each other Snapchats, it seems that they can actually accomplish a whole lot.

What began as a dip in the light given off by a distant sun has been validated and cataloged — and Wagg is now being hailed as something of a boy wonder. He might be, according to the university, the youngest person to ever discover a new planet. [The Washington Post]

Wagg, a precocious straight-A student who plans to study physics, is modest about his achievement, saying that sheer luck was certainly a factor in his discovery of the planet now called WASP-142b, which orbits a star in our galaxy 1,000 light-years away.

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"It is very difficult to do, no matter how good you are at actually looking for them," he told the BBC. "In a way, some of it comes down to luck. Just finding it ... you can be as good as you want and still never find one."

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Samantha Rollins is TheWeek.com's news editor. She has previously worked for The New York Times and TIME and is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.