Reddit user says a long Claude Code session may have found an exoplanet candidate
A user posting as specbug on r/ClaudeAI says a nine-day Claude Code cloud session on the Pro plan may have uncovered an exoplanet candidate in a system about 218 light-years away. The candidate is described as 3.75 times Earth's size and as appearing in four TESS transits captured between 2019 and 2026; the poster also published a Zenodo preprint, data and code, and pre-registered predictions for TESS monitoring in February 2027. The poster says they are not an astronomer and stresses this is a candidate, not a confirmed planet, and that official CTOI listing would require a peer-reviewed paper. They describe using Fable 5.1 to plan, Opus 5.5 to run the full analysis, and Fable again for an independent check.
It is an unverified personal account, but the claimed end-to-end Claude Code transit analysis and the publicly pre-registered predictions give a case of AI-assisted research that later TESS observations could test.
| I recently came across this post and was greatly inspired! I am no astronomer either, but I've always had a keen interest. Last week I ran a lengthy Claude session, and may have discovered an exoplanet in a system 218 light-years away. The planet candidate is 3.75 times the size of the Earth, and is seen in four transits captured by TESS from 2019 - 2026. I've also pre-registered my predictions for future transits, that overlap TESS monitoring, in Feb 2027. Wrote a blogpost to distill my findings: https://sixeleven.in/blog/tic402710280 On the Claude side: everything ran in a single Claude Code cloud session on the Pro plan, over nine days, across several usage-limit resets, some credits and a few free resets I’d saved up. I worked out the initial plan with Fable 5.1 (the goal plus references from the earlier post). Opus 5.5 did the entire execution, and I used Fable again to independently check the final analysis. Same disclaimer as the original post: this is a candidate, not a confirmed planet. Getting it listed officially (as a CTOI) needs a peer-reviewed paper, which I’m working on. If you can help get it to a journal, or can endorse an arXiv submission, I’d greatly appreciate it! Please feel free to DM here or email me (the address is in the blogpost). submitted by /u/specbug [link] [comments] |