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


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.
Back in 2013, then-15-year-old British student Tom Wagg, who was in his third day of a "work experience" project studying at Keel University, made an interesting discovery, which he believed was a new planet. The discovery, of course, had to be vetted and confirmed. Now, two years later, the 17-year-old Wagg has official confirmation that his finding was indeed an indication of an actual planet:
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.
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