Matteo Paz discover over a million objects in space and win $250,000
- Soraima
- Mar 18
- 1 min read
Posted on March 18, 2025, By Soraima
Matteo Paz, an 18-year-old high school student from Pasadena, California, developed an AI program that achieved remarkable success in astrophysics. His machine-learning algorithm analyzed over 200 terabytes of data from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope, leading to the discovery of 1.5 million previously unidentified celestial objects.
These discoveries include a variety of brightness-variable objects such as supermassive black holes, newborn stars, supernovae, and rare stars and galaxies. This work resulted in a comprehensive catalog called VarWISE, which contains 1.9 million infrared variable objects in total, with 1.5 million being new findings.
Paz’s algorithm, dubbed VARnet, efficiently sifted through approximately 200 billion rows of full-sky infrared data, a task that had not been comprehensively tackled before. His efforts were recognized with the top prize of $250,000 in the 2025 Regeneron Science Talent Search, a prestigious U.S. competition for high school seniors.
Beyond the discoveries themselves, his work is already being utilized by researchers at Caltech to study dual-star systems and could contribute to understanding the universe's expansion rate, potentially addressing fundamental questions in cosmology.
Paz is preparing to submit VarWISE for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, with the algorithm itself already peer-reviewed and published in the Astronomical Journal in November 2024.
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