Teen Finds 1.5M Space Objects in NASA Data, Wins $250K

A teenager armed with coding skills and NASA's old data just added 1.5 million cosmic discoveries to humanity's map of the universe.

Matteo Paz was just looking for a meaningful summer project in 2022 when he joined the Planet Finder Academy in California. The program connects high school students with real astronomy challenges, and Paz got assigned to examine data from NASA's NEOWISE mission.

NEOWISE launched in 2009 to track asteroids near Earth. Over a decade, it collected nearly 200 billion infrared measurements of the sky, capturing signals from stars, galaxies, and distant cosmic events that no one had time to fully analyze.

The original plan was simple: manually study a small chunk of the archive. But Paz, a student at Pasadena High School with a knack for math and programming, had a bigger idea.

He built an automated machine learning system that could scan the massive dataset looking for objects whose brightness changes over time. These tiny flickers and pulses are easy to miss but incredibly important because they reveal rare cosmic events like supernovae, binary star systems, and quasars.

Working under scientist Davy Kirkpatrick at NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Centre, Paz spent six weeks refining his model. He used advanced mathematical tools like Fourier transforms and wavelet analysis to detect faint patterns that earlier studies had overlooked.

The system worked better than anyone expected. It identified objects that varied too slowly or too briefly to show up in initial scans, revealing cosmic behavior that traditional methods couldn't catch.

Paz teamed up with researchers at the California Institute of Technology to expand the system across the full NEOWISE archive. Together they created a new catalogue of more than 1.5 million previously unidentified variable objects scattered across the sky.

The Ripple Effect

This discovery shows how powerful it can be to revisit old scientific data with fresh eyes and new tools. Archives that seemed fully explored can still hold millions of secrets waiting for the right approach.

For astronomers, these variable objects are golden. They help explain stellar evolution and extreme astrophysical processes that don't follow predictable patterns, opening windows into some of the universe's most mysterious events.

Paz's work also earned him over $250,000 in recognition and prizes. But perhaps more importantly, it proves that major scientific breakthroughs don't require decades of experience or access to the newest technology.

Sometimes all it takes is a curious student, a summer break, and the willingness to think differently about problems everyone assumed were already solved.