Tom Wagg may be the youngest person to date to discover a planet. Two years ago, when he was only 15, Wagg was taking part in a work-study program at Keele University when he spotted a tiny dip in a stars light as the planet passed in front of it.

The data he was looking at was part of the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project, the UK’s leading team searching for exoplanets.

“I’m hugely excited to have a found a new planet, and I’m very impressed that we can find them so far away. The WASP software was impressive, enabling me to search through hundreds of different stars, looking for ones that have a planet,” said Wagg, now aged 17 and a pupil at Newcastle-under-Lyme School, in a statement.

After the initial sighting, the planet was verified by researchers at the University of Geneva and the University of Liege.

Designated WASP-142b, the planet is roughly the size of Jupiter is located in the Southern constellation of Hydra. According to the researchers it is very close to its star, orbiting roughly every two days making it a “hot Jupiter”. Planet’s in this group are thought to have slowly migrated close to their star.

According to a report published in February in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our own Jupiter nearly ended this way. The researchers believe that Jupiter initially migrated inward, destroying the solar systems first generation of rocky planets.

It was the formation of Saturn that eventually pulled Jupiter back out to its present position and allowed Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars to form.

The catalog designation WASP-142b is a reference to the planet being the 142nd planet discovered by the WASP project. Wagg hopes that the planet will be given a better name by the International Astronomical Union which is currently holding its first round of competitions to name extra-solar planets.

Tom Wagg reports that he has always been interested in science and the process of discovering a new planets. He hopes to physics when he gets to university.

`Tom is keen to learn about science, so it was easy to train him to look for planets”, says Professor Coel Hellier, who leads the WASP project at Keele.

A catalogue of known planets outside our solar system can be found at the NASA Exoplanet Archive.