Pranav Sivakumar- Google Science Fair

[Music] my name's pranav i'm 16 years old and i'm from tower lakes illinois i'm currently a student at the illinois mathematics and science academy in aurora i enjoy walks with my family playing chess and shooting hoops i got a telescope when i was six and ever since then i've loved looking up at the night sky i'm especially interested in quasars which are objects in space that emit huge amounts of energy but they're really difficult to see because there are massive galaxies sitting between quasars and earth which causes gravitational lensing gravitational lensing happens when the light

from quasars is distorted by the gravity of massive galaxies this can make a single quasar look like multiple light sources instead of just one i wanted to find a way to detect this distortion so we can find more quasars i started by creating an algorithm after a lot of changes i began to get some results then i had to sort through hundreds of pictures to make sure that what i was finding were actually quasars and not something else figuring out how to deal with these false identifications was the hardest part it involved completely rewriting my

work with the help of my mentor but finally my algorithm was successful now scientists can measure parts of the universe even more accurately i've been doing this research for three years and i'm still working on my theories every time i make progress i discover more complex questions we live in a world full of information but there's so much more in the universe just waiting to be discovered you