Youngest person to discover an extrasolar planet (male)

The youngest person to discover an exoplanet is British astronomer Tom Wagg. During a work experience placement at Keele University in Staffordshire, UK, on 13 Feb 2013, Wagg was given some sky survey telescope data and a basic introduction to exoplanet hunting. An hour or so later, he spotted the tell-tale dip in luminosity associated with an exoplanet transit (a planet passing in front of a star). At the time of the discovery Wagg was aged 15 years 75 days, although it wasn't until 2015 that the existence of his exoplanet was confirmed by follow-up observations and named WASP-142b.

The survey data Wagg used was from the WASP collaboration (wide-angle search for planets), which distributes data from a pair of robotic telescopes to academic institutions around the world, where it is then analysed.

In November 2016, Wagg was credited as a co-author on the paper "WASP-South Transiting Exoplanets", which detailed what is known about WASP-142b and six others that were found during the same period. WASP-142b is a type of gas giant called a "hot Jupiter", which orbits very close to its parent star. It is around 1.5 times the size of our Solar System's largest planet, but has only around 85 percent of its mass.

Wagg went on to study astrophysics and computer science at Harvard, and is currently undertaking his PhD in astrophysics at the University of Washington. His specific areas of interest are binary star formation and gravitational wave astronomy