Text by GOPALA VARADARAJAN and JERRY FANG
Art by BLAIR MIGDAL and photo by JULIAN KOBAYASHI
SC URING THE SKY STUDENT SCIENTIST DETECTS NEW ASTEROIDS
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HIS IS A PRETTY BRIGHT source,” said Palo Alto High School senior Franklin Wang, recalling the moment when he found his first undiscovered asteroid. “It’s moving in a straight line … There’s no [previously known] objects within this vicinity. No asteroids, no satellites. Then it’s most likely going to be an asteroid that’s new.” Over the span of two years, Wang developed an artificial intelligence algorithm to scan public telescope data and tuned it to detect near-Earth objects, an extraordinary achievement for anyone, let alone a high school student. Before diving into the complex world of outer space, Wang’s passion for astronomy originated from watching “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” and reading Scientific American. Wang’s enthusiasm for programming, on the other hand, began in second grade when a friend introduced him to Scratch, a simple visual programming language in which he could code simple games. As he grew older, Wang delved into more intricate programming languages, such as Java and
Python, being motivated by competi- algorithm reported many more asteroids tions such as the USA Computing Olym- than he expected, far too many to be true. “I got a bunch of false positive repiad and using Youtube as a resource. These two passions converged in sults,” Wang said. “It was just spewing 2019, when astronomy professor Dr. Jian out stuff that weren’t asteroids at all … it Ge of the University of Florida recom- was tens of thousands, that was just too much.” mended a research paAfter perper to Wang during a revising mentorship program. I was shaking. Is it ac- sistently his algorithm over The report described tually going to be real? many months, a process to find asWang reduced the teroids using machine And it was … that was number of false learning and asteroid crazy.” — FRANKLIN WANG, senior positives to levels data from Caltech’s where manual siftZwicky Transient Facility. Inspired by the paper, Wang de- ing was viable. From there, he compared cided to try his hand at making his own the orbitals of previously discovered asteroids to his data, containing a mixture asteroid-detecting algorithm. “The whole first couple of months of possible asteroids and miscellaneous was trying to figure out what this field streaks of light. “Previously I found … figments of is and how it works,” Wang said. “That was basically getting to see what real as- a star being super bright, causing some teroids look like in terms of little trails.” artifacting,” Wang said. But after punching numbers into the Initially, Wang was only able to extract a couple hundred pictures from the asteroid database and realizing he stumZTF. This proved problematic for his bled upon an undetected asteroid, Wang code, as training an artificial intelligence was speechless. “I was shaking,” Wang said. “ ‘Is it to identify asteroids required having preactually going to be real?’ And it was … vious images from observatories. “Machine learning algorithms, they that was crazy.” Following his initial discovery, Wang want thousands, tens of thousands of imidentified five more new asteroids over ages,” Wang said. To compensate for the lack of infor- the next four days. His breakthrough mation, Wang created his own asteroid won him awards at the International Science and Engineering Fair, including data. “I can try to simulate some first place in physics and astronomy and data because they’re generally $30,000 in prize money. “When you make an impact in terms simple … you can mathematically model the [asteroid] of research, it’s figuring things out … until you hit that point where like, okay, I’m trails,” Wang said. However, the first finally making discoveries now,” Wang said. “I was just really excited to iterations of Wang’s see that everything I’ve done has finally paid off.” v
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ANALYZING ALGORITHMS — Paly senior Franklin Wang inspects his code, hoping to automate more of the process. “The goal here is to first of all revise it,” Wang said. “There’s a lot of human involvement still.”
36 NOVEMBER 2021
