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High Schooler Discovers Comet, Launches Astronomy Career Through Citizen Science
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Moneycontrol•25-09-2026, 11:44
High Schooler Discovers Comet, Launches Astronomy Career Through Citizen Science
- •In 2005, high school student Quanzhi Ye discovered a sungrazing comet by scanning free NASA-ESA images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) through the Sungrazer citizen science project.
- •Ye's discovery was the 1,019th comet found by the project and marked the beginning of his successful astronomy career, leading to a Ph.D. and the Harold C. Urey Prize in 2023.
- •The SOHO mission, launched in 1995, uses its LASCO instrument to block the Sun's glare, enabling the detection of faint comets passing close to the Sun, which are often difficult to observe from Earth.
- •The Sungrazer Project allows volunteers worldwide to access spacecraft images and report new sungrazing and near-Sun comets, demonstrating how public data can lead to significant scientific discoveries.
- •The project has grown substantially, with SOHO reaching its 5,000th comet discovery in March 2024, highlighting the major contributions of citizen scientists to comet research.
Key Questions Answered
Quanzhi Ye discovered his first sungrazing comet while still in high school by scanning publicly available images from the SOHO spacecraft through the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project.
The Sungrazer Project is a citizen science initiative that gives volunteers worldwide access to space-based coronagraph images, allowing them to search for and report faint sungrazing comets that are difficult to spot from Earth.
In 2023, Quanzhi Ye received the Harold C. Urey Prize from the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences for his early-career work on small bodies in the solar system.
