A Tech PM Used Claude Code to Find a Planet Candidate Nobody Had Spotted
I think I found a planet nobody knew existed. I used Claude Code to find it
Working from NASA's TESS data, Pavel Rabtsevich — a product manager, not a professional astronomer — used Claude Code with Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 to flag a repeating 3.18-day dip in a star 116 light-years away. The signal appears in 2018, 2020, and 2025 observations, suggesting a planet about 1.4 times Earth's size. After 74 analyses and more than 1,000 scripts, he published a preprint and preregistered transit predictions. TESS will re-observe the star from October 31 to November 26 under approved program #100.
The useful way to use an agent for science isn't to ask: 'Is this a planet?' It's to keep giving it ways to prove that it isn't.
- colijobles
Brilliant application. Imagine the progress we could make with models post trained on scientific process and a good agentic process.
I've been tinkering with the latter for the last couple of months. Yesterday my system made some progress on instabilities on a particular superconductive system: https://colinocallaghan.com/autonomous-ai-research/Spatial-P...
- __alias
Laughed at the reddit comment
> "We got vibe astronomy before GTA6"
- _fuchs
So much AI in the writing. If you dont care to write i do not care to read.
- ContinuityLab
Cool discovery, but I'd be real curious about the false-positive rate when letting coding agents loose on raw astronomical telemetry. Hallucinations in data reduction are no joke.
- soltanov
Call me when peer review confirms it; until then, it is noise fitting noise.
(Reason: Clean cut through the hype directly to scientific validation.)