Claude Code 協助找到一顆尚未確認的行星候選

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r/ClaudeAI•1d ago

u/This_Cell_1829

I think I found a planet nobody knew existed. I used Claude Code to find it.

Built with Claude

Last month I was going through data from NASA's TESS telescope with Claude Code when one star started looking weird.

It's about 116 light-years away, and every 3.18 days it gets about 0.05% dimmer for roughly two hours.

I first saw it in data from late 2025. So I went backwards.

The same dip is there in completely separate TESS observations from 2020.

Then 2018.

If it's a planet, it's about 1.4× the size of Earth.

To be clear: this is still a planet candidate, not a confirmed planet.

The part that might be interesting to this subreddit is how I did the analysis.

I used Claude Code with Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 for most of the actual work: downloading and parsing the TESS data, writing the search code, fitting the transits, checking nearby stars, looking for secondary eclipses and other false positives, generating plots, and rerunning things when a test failed.

I chose what questions to ask, what tests mattered, and what counted as pass/fail.

Independent reviews came from Codex and from separate agent sessions that started fresh, with read-only access.

In about two weeks this turned into 74 separate analyses and 1,000+ scripts.

And I learned pretty quickly that 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.

My favorite test was simple.

I hid one entire year of observations, used the other two years to calculate the orbit, and predicted where the transits in the hidden year should be. Then I checked the hidden year only at those times.

I did that three times.

2018 → predicted.
2020 → predicted.
2025 → predicted.

3 out of 3.

The audits also caught actual mistakes.

At one point I had a statistical claim that looked stronger than it really was. An audit found the problem, so I removed the claim and redid that part of the analysis.

The main 3.18-day signal survived.

I also wanted to know whether somebody had already found it.

So I searched 36 catalogs and literature sources and 340,505 automatic TESS planet-search alerts.

I couldn't find either signal reported.

There may be a second candidate around the same star, roughly 2.2 Earth radii on an 11.13-day orbit. The evidence for that one is much weaker, so I'm treating it separately.

And now comes the part I proud of.

TESS comes back to this part of the sky in November. I submitted an observing proposal asking it to record this star every 2 minutes while it's there.

It was approved. Program #100.

TESS observes it again from October 31 to November 26.

On October 6, before any of that new data exists, I published the exact times the transits should happen and the rules for deciding whether the prediction passes or fails.

So this is now falsifiable in a very literal way.

If the dips appear when predicted, the case gets much stronger.

If they don't, that counts against it, and the preregistration makes that impossible to quietly rewrite afterward.

I also built a little free interactive 3D version of the system if you want to fly around it:

https://tic4206066.pages.dev

Preprint:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22967456

Predictions published before the new TESS data:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23175179

TESS DDT program list:

https://tess.mit.edu/science/ddt/

Has anyone else here used Claude Code for actual research rather than software development?

I'd especially love to hear how you're auditing agent-written analysis when a result can look completely convincing and still be wrong.

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ClaudeAI-mod-bot

•1d ago• Edited 19h ago

TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 400 comments.

The consensus is clear: this is fucking incredible. After a flood of useless AI-generated shite, OP (a tech PM, not a pro astronomer) dropped a bombshell by using Claude Code to find a legitimate exoplanet candidate, and even got NASA to point a telescope at it for confirmation. The community is hailing this as one of the best, most tangible uses of AI seen on this sub.

Even the pros are impressed. Several exoplanet researchers, including a professor, jumped into the thread to confirm the signal is real and a "totally reasonable candidate." They also provided a healthy dose of scientific reality, noting it's still a borderline signal that could be a false positive (like a background eclipsing binary).

The most valuable part of the thread might be the discussion on how to properly audit AI-generated science. The key takeaways from other researchers in the comments are:

Falsify, don't just verify. As OP said, the goal is to keep giving the AI ways to prove the hypothesis wrong.
Break your tests on purpose. If a check never fails, you don't know if it's actually working or just hardcoded to return True.
Don't trust the summary. Re-derive key numbers yourself from the raw output, not from a summary the agent wrote.

Of course, half the thread is just asking what to name the planet. Suggestions range from "Claude" to "Boaty McPlanet Face" and "Urrectum." OP says they probably won't get to choose, but we can dream. A few users also clocked the post's "Claude-ish" writing style, which OP confirmed was due to being too excited to write it all by hand.

7 more replies