High-School Student Discovers 1.5 Million Space Objects

Matteo Paz, an 18-year-old California high-school student, used a machine-learning pipeline to analyze NASA's NEOWISE archival data and identified over 1.5 million previously unidentified space objects, in work published in The Astronomical Journal in 2024 and awarded the $250,000 Regeneron Science Talent Search prize. Paz processed roughly 200 billion detection rows to detect faint variable sources, suggesting the pipeline could scale to other telescopes' archives.