🔭 High School Student Received $250k for Discovering 1.5 Million Space Objects with the Help of AI

Matteo Paz, an 18-year-old high school student from California, has been interested in astronomy since childhood. From the age of 15, he took part in the space exploration programs for high school students at Caltech.

Under the guidance of his Caltech mentor, astronomer Dave Kirkpatrick, Matteo developed the VARnet model, which identifies variable cosmic objects such as supermassive black holes and supernovae. Matteo's project won a prestigious science competition for high school students with a $250,000 prize. 

Paz applied the algorithm to process a huge amount of data (more than 200 terabytes) collected for 10.5 years by the now-retired infrared telescope NEOWISE. The telescope primarily observed asteroids near Earth but also detected many distant space objects that flashed, pulsated, or dimmed during eclipses.

After analyzing the archived dataset, Paz's algorithm identified 1.5 million previously unknown objects. The results are still awaiting verification, and the complete catalog will be released by the end of the year.

The AI model is in the public domain and potentially suitable for other research. According to Mateo, it can be useful for analyzing the stock market, atmospheric effects, and other phenomena where the information similarly comes in a time series.

Mateo dreams of continuing his research and, in the future, properly measuring the rate of expansion of the universe, challenging our understanding of its origin. Mateo recently got his first paid job—at his mentor's research center for various NASA projects at Caltech.