In the summer of 2022, a high school student named Matteo Paz joined a summer program at Caltech. Six weeks later, he had built an AI system that found 1.5 million cosmic objects no one had ever seen before.

The program, called the Planet Finder Academy, pairs students with real scientific datasets. Paz was handed a decade of data from NASA’s NEOWISE telescope — 200 billion rows of infrared measurements tracking the full sky. The team had planned to study a small slice manually. Paz had other ideas.

Drawing on his background in math and coding, he built a machine-learning pipeline that could detect faint, variable light sources — objects whose brightness shifts too subtly or unpredictably for human eyes or standard software to catch. The model was designed to find the cosmic equivalent of a flickering candle in a stadium full of lights.

It worked. His system identified quasars, binary stars, and supernovae signatures that had been sitting in the data, invisible, for years. His mentor, Caltech scientist Davy Kirkpatrick, told Phys.org that the results “only got more exciting” as Paz fine-tuned the model.

This is not a story about a prodigy. It is a story about what happens when you give a smart, curious person the right tools and a real problem.

The AI Paz built was not a frontier model. It did not cost millions of dollars to train. It was a focused, practical application of machine learning on a specific scientific task — the kind of project that is increasingly possible because of the open-weight AI revolution that DeepSeek and others have accelerated. You do not need a billion-dollar budget to build something that matters. You need a problem, a dataset, and the willingness to experiment.

What strikes me about this story is not the scale of the discovery — though 1.5 million new cosmic objects is staggering. It is the reminder that AI is still a tool, and the most interesting things happen when people use it to see what was already there, just hidden from view.

The universe is full of flickering candles. Paz built the lamp that found them.

Source: Futura Sciences, June 2026