A high school student discovers 1.5 million stars thanks to AI!
Matteo Paz with the president of the very famous Caltech University, Thomas F. Rosenbaum. © California Institute of Technology
Matteo Paz, a high school student from Pasadena (California), won the first $ 250,000 prize from the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2025, the oldest and prestigious science competition in the United States for Terminale students. For this, it has designed algorithms that have enabled artificial intelligence to discover 1.5 million new potential astronomical objects from billions of data.
The beautiful story begins for Matteo with conferences on astronomy given to Caltech, Californian university at 30 Nobel Prize winners, to which his mother brings him while he is still in primary school. In 2023, he enrolled in a six -week summer research program, still at the famous Californian Institute of Technology. He meets his mentor there, Davy Kirkpatrick, main astronomer at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), NASA organization based on campus.
“I was so lucky to meet Davyrecalls Paz. The first day I spoke to him, I explained to him that I was considering working on a set of data that were going to ask me much more than six weeks, and he did not discourage me. He said: 'Ok, let's see that.' He made me grow as a scientist. ”
Matteo Paz presents his first works during a seminar in 2023. © Photo by Kitty Cahalan
The peeled Neowise space telescope
Neowise (in reality Wise) is a space telescope today destroyed in the atmosphere, but its name remains attached for the general public to comets, in particular C/2020 F3 which was visible to the naked eye at the end of July 2020 in the direction of the Big Dipper.
COMETE C/2020 F3 in the summer of 2020. © Jeremy Perez
Operating in infrared like the James-Webb currently, this space telescope scrutinized the whole of the sky in search of geocroisters objects, brown dwarf stars or stars masked by dust of the Galactic Center. He had thus garnered more than 26 million shots between 2009 and 2024, as well as billions of data. The mentor of the young Matteo Paz, Davy Kirkpatrick, also thought that there was a lot to learn from Neowise data, in which quasars, supernovæ and other cosmic treasures had to hide.
“At that time, we headed for around 200 billion lines in the detection table that we had formed in more than a decadeexplains Mr. Kirkpatrick. My idea for summer was therefore to take a small piece from the sky and see if we could find variable stars. Then we could highlight those incumbent on the astronomical community. ”
A high school student at the heart of advanced astronomical research
Matteo Paz had mathematical, computer and astronomical knowledge to code the algorithms necessary for such highlights. Result, 1.5 million potential signatures of new stars! “The model I have applied can be used for other studies in the field of astronomy, and potentially everything that is in a temporal format”details the young prodigy.
Having just reached the majority, Matteo Paz is currently completing his secondary studies, but he is already employed in Caltech, where he attended his mentor Kirkpatrick. Together, they manage the precious data from Neowise, as well as other spatial missions of NASA.
