Pasadena high schooler earns top science award

Matteo Paz combined astronomy with machine learning systems designed to classify celestial objects. The Pasadena High School senior earned the top prize in the Regeneron Science Talent Search.

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always loved astronomy since I was a kid. I’ve always, you know, wanted to help explore the universe and this is a really great way to do that. I’ve always been like super interested in supernova, these black holes, these super violent big things in the universe that we don’t know about. Matteo P combined astronomy with machine learning systems designed to classify celestial objects. The Pasad High School senior’s ingenuity earned him the top prize, 250,000 bucks in the Regeneron Science Talent Search. Congratulations, Matteo. How exciting is that? And what a great face. That was an amazing Yeah. Yeah. I can’t really escape it. Yeah. Yeah. That was your moment. Uh congratulations. First of all, how did it feel to win it? Uh obviously, as you can tell, I was completely surprised. I met a lot of really, really smart kids there and I just had no idea that I’d come out on top. Yeah. Okay. So, this was obviously in the heart of Washington DC. for for those of us that are not great engineers, explain your your science project in the most simple terms. Yeah. So, what I did is I took data from one of NASA’s missions called the Wise Space Telescope and I put it through computers, made them think, and what I did is I found these objects in the sky that are changing in brightness over time. And so, you used infrared, right, to to sort of see and and AI together. Yes. to spot a bunch of objects that nobody had spotted before. You’re like the first person in human history to spot these objects. Yeah. So, it’s, you know, it’s a big undertaking. It’s a lot of data that these space telescopes put out. But using AI, we can get some new insights, look at the um the whole sky in a completely new way, and we can really draw out these new discoveries that people haven’t seen before. So, you as an 18-year-old basically created or discovered things in the universe that nobody knew existed. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it’s uh it’s special. Yeah. Every uh every star it’s like a it’s a new person. They have their own personalities, own characteristics and Yeah. You know, we have that registry. You should be able to get to name like many of them. You know, you’d think you’d think you shouldn’t have to pay for that. So, what what are the the practical implications of of knowing that all this stuff is out there that we didn’t know about? Yeah. So my catalog called the var wise catalog um I’m studying things called variable objects things that are changing in the night sky. This can actually be used by other astrophysicists and other astronomers for their own studies. There is already a group at Caltech using it to study the masses of these certain kinds of stars in the universe. We can also use these objects to measure how fast the universe is expanding. We can even find exoplanets which might be habitable for humans in the future. What made you think this is my thing? This is what I’m going to do. You know, I’ve always loved astronomy. It’s, you know, just the scale of it is very in

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