The American high school student Mattéo Paz used artificial intelligence to analyze the data of an old telescope. He thus discovered 1.5 million potential new stars.
At just 18 years old, Matteo Paz is already at the origin of a major astronomical discovery. This American high school student has developed algorithms that allowed him, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), to discover 1.5 million potential cosmic objects so far unknown.
For this, the young man mobilized the data of an old telescope called Neowise, which was disabled in 2024. During his ten years of service, the machine had, according to NASA, created cards from the whole of the sky including 1.45 million infrared measures of more than 44,000 objects of the solar system.
According to Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, these were mainly difficult to detect, like quasars, these massive black holes which are the brightest entities of the universe. Neowise was capable of detecting the temperature variations of these objects, but the extent of the data collected made their analysis impossible by astronomers.
Matteo Paz used these 200 billion data lines to lead to its IA model to detect the subtle variations appearing in the infrared measurements of the telescope, linked to the presence of potential new stars.
His ingenuity allowed him to win the first prize of $ 250,000 from the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2025, a prestigious American science and mathematics competition open to students of Terminale.
Matteo Paz does not intend to stop there, since he now applies to publish the complete catalog of objects discovered thanks to his research. He was also hired by Caltech in parallel with his studies, in order to improve his AI model and adapt it to even more ambitious projects.
