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