A schoolboy from Staffordshire, U.K. discovers a planet under the Hot Jupiter category and is said to be 1,000 light years away from Earth. At 15, he is one of the youngest individuals to ever discover a planet, according to Keele University.
The boy named Tom Wagg is a student at Newcastle-under-Lyme School who has always been interested in the sciences. He applied for a work-experience week at Keele University, where he became part of a group called Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP). The group members of WASP primarily investigate on the exoplanets. "Tom is keen to learn about science, so it was easy to train him to look for planets," says Professor Coel Hellier, leader of the WASP project.
Tom was able to discover the planet by studying the information available at WASP. The WASP data include details of planetary monitorings by looking for dips and transits under the night skies, caused by a host star being blocked by a planet. "The WASP software was impressive, enabling me to search through hundreds of different stars, looking for ones that have a planet," says Tom.
The planets under hot Jupiter's - including Tom's discovery - are very large in size and rotate around its host star more closely than the distance of the sun to the Earth. With this, exoplanets belonging to this class can become extremely hot, reaching up to 1,000 degrees.
The exoplanet discovered by Tom is situated within the Milky Way galaxy but is in another distant solar system. Despite its comparably large size as Jupiter's, Tom's planet can orbit its star within two days, contrary to the 4,272 days that Jupiter needs to rotate around the sun. The large size and close distance to its star are what makes these exoplanets easily detectable through advanced types of telescopes and new detection strategies. The strategy used by Tom involves measuring the amount of light that blocks the host star when the exoplanet passes between the Earth and the host star. The scientist then records the amount of light received by the Earth and monitors the sky for a dip.
There are about 1000 exoplanets discovered by scientists and Tom's is the 142nd planet detected under the WASP project. With this, Tom's planet was given the catalog number WASP-142b, but an ongoing competition has been initiated to identify a name for it. The confirmation of Tom's discovery took a total of two years.
"I'm hugely excited to have a found a new planet, and I'm very impressed that we can find them so far away," says now 17-year-old Tom. Tom attained all A* in 12 GCSEs ever since the discovery happened. He has expressed his future plan of studying physics at the university.
