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“I Mapped the Invisible”: An American High-School Student Stuns Scientists by Discovering 1.5 Million Lost Space Objects


A California teenager stumbled onto a cosmic treasure trove while digging through forgotten NASA data. What started as a summer project turned into a groundbreaking AI discovery—now published in a leading science journal.

In what may be one of the most unexpected breakthroughs in modern astronomy, a high school student from California has used artificial intelligence to detect over 1.5 million previously unidentified space objects —all from data collected by a retired NASA mission. Over the summer and the months that followed, Paz collaborated with Caltech researchers including Shoubaneh Hemmati, Daniel Masters, Ashish Mahabal, and Matthew Graham, refining the algorithm to work across the entire sky dataset. The full catalogue is expected to be released in 2025 and could inform follow-up observations by telescopes such as Vera Rubin Observatory or JWST, offering fresh clues about the life cycles of stars, distant galaxies, and other energetic processes across the universe.

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