A group of year 11 pupils at Horbury Academy in Wakefield were given the co-ordinates of a possible comet by Nick Howes, a manager at the Faulkes Telescope Project.
Based at the University of Glamorgan, the project enables schools to access live images from a global network of robotic telescopes.
Led by their teacher, Paul Campbell, the Horbury youngsters used computers in the school classroom to access and control Faulkes’ telescopes in Hawaii and Australia.
After spotting what had originally been described as “an asteroidal object” they sent off their data to the Minor Planet Centre in Massachussetts.
The following day they got the news that they had identified a new comet, which has been given the name C/2013 G9 (Tenagra).
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