What was your biggest achievement at the age of 15? This lad discovered a city!

The revelation went viral after a report on the findings was posted on Reddit - with hundreds of commenters amazed by the teenager's discovery.


William Gadoury, from Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec, made the discovery by comparing star charts with satellite images. The new city, discovered in a Mexican jungle, is thought to be the fourth biggest Mayan city, and has been named 'Mouth of Fire' by the teenager.



His hobby eventually turned into serious research. The imaginative youngster theorised that the locations of Mayan cities might correspond to stars in Mayan constellations.

He analysed 22 Mayan star maps from ancient books (known as the Madrid Codex), and overlaid the star positions onto Google Earth images of the Yucatan Peninsula.

He was able to show that the 117 Mayan cities did indeed match the star positions, with the brightest stars representing more major cities.

Thankfully, the teenager had a close relationship with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) - he had won a science competition a year earlier for his theory - and they had already been providing him with images from their RADARSAT-2 satellite, which has cutting-edge terrain mapping abilities.

They gave him images of the new location.

Source: BBC

Image: Canadian Space Agency