“I Mapped the Invisible”: American High-School Student Stuns Astronomers by Discovering 1.5 Million Hidden Cosmic Objects

“I Mapped the Invisible”: American High-School Student Stuns Astronomers by Discovering 1.5 Million Hidden Cosmic Objects

The numbers arrived with the dispassion of a telemetry readout: 10.5 years of observations, 200 billion individual detections, a complete infrared survey of the entire sky. For more than a decade after the NEOWISE telescope began its reactivated mission, the data sat in institutional archives, processed for its primary purpose of asteroid tracking but otherwise unread. The variable objects, quasars that flickered, stars that pulsed, binaries tha…