1.5mn cosmic objects detected on retired telescope using AI by high schooler. Why it matters

A high school student discovered more than 1.5 million unidentified space objects scanning data on a retired telescope, doing the unthinkable. The 18-year-old published his findings in 2024 inThe Astronomical Journal, and his work has now been peer reviewed. It started as a project for the Caltech Planet Finder Academy. Under the program, students are able to work on and experience real-world astronomy challenges. Matteo Paz was given archival data from NASA's NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) telescope. He had access to over 200 billion rows of spreadsheets, but could not humanly study and analyse all of them. He had the choice to restrict his research to a small subset of data.

Algorithm scanned NEOWISE data and revealed millions of objects

However, he took it up a notch and built an algorithm to scan and process the archive. Paz developed a machine-learning pipeline in six weeks that automated ML training and deployments. His algorithm could accurately detect light sources that were too faint and changed so subtly that they could have never been picked up by the naked eye.

Also Read: 'You source of tears...': A monk saw the 76-year comet TWICE 600 years before Edmond Halley did

Paz's algorithm was so good that it started detecting the tiniest of flickering and pulsing. There were objects that were fading and then returning. These included binary stars (quasars). It ended up finding 1.5 million such cosmic objects that had never been seen before. His work was not only published, but he was also awarded $250K in the Regeneron Science Talent Search. Now scientists are wondering whether Paz's algorithm can be used to find such goldmines in the data of other telescopes that are no longer functioning. Kepler is one such telescope that was retired in the last decade, but contains a treasure trove of information, a lot of which remains to be scanned and studied.

Also Read: A star vanished in Andromeda galaxy. Now a strange red source is puzzling astronomers

NASA and telescope to detect asteroids

NASA's NEOWISE telescope contains data spanning more than a decade. It was designed to find and measure asteroids and comets, and find anomalous objects in the solar system. The space telescope was launched in 2009 and discovered over 3,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs). It went momentarily out of service in 2011, before being revived in 2013 to identify hazardous asteroids. It was retired in August 2024. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help identify many more cosmic objects, and the technology is already being applied to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.