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

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

pyduan

Comments (69)

  • flaburgan
    While I find it great that Claude is now helping people to progress on topics they may have not have time or knowledge for before, I found it a bit sad that this is done alone in a bedroom. NASA and ESA do have this kind of program, where they publish data and encourage people to help. There is exactly this for exoplanet searching:- NASA (with the TESS mission): https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/nora-dot-eisner/planet-h...- ESA (with the CHEOPS mission): https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/bmerin/planet-hunters-ch... (Very new! Will be announced next week!)If you are logged in with an account they will even recognise you and add your name to the paper!So instead of playing alone, join the common effort, this is how science will progress efficiently!
  • londons_explore
    Why wasn't this found before?Surely 'take all observations of the sky and for every visible star do a frequency analysis' is step 1 when looking for planets?
  • fsniper
    Oh no more old.reddit? I can't read this without an app? Absolutely no.. This is bonkers.
  • 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...
  • flyinglizard
    It’s written as if this was Claude congratulating itself.
  • 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.
  • __alias
    Laughed at the reddit comment> "We got vibe astronomy before GTA6"
  • 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.)
  • dkpk
    I’m sure we’ll find Planet Nine soon.
  • hmyn
    just this line "I chose what questions to ask, what tests mattered, and what counted as pass/fail."
  • k310
    Planet Claude?Asking for a friend.
  • higeorge13
    This is incredible use of AI tools. Big kudos!
  • elzbardico
    Plot twist: The discovery is valid. But we figure out the author was not a innocent PM, but a team of astronomers working for Anthropic, And Anthropic's marketing department come up with the idea of crediting it to a PM. :-D
  • wartywhoa23
    Found a planet and saved a granny. Wake me up when this planet is acknowledged by any astonomer community with more say than r/ClaudeAI.
  • _fuchs
    [flagged]
  • amirkhanian
    Not an astronomer, but I'm a non-programmer who spent two months building a fairly big web app with Claude, so the false-positive question is the one I'd ask too.What saved me wasn't asking Claude whether it was right (it almost always says yes). It was checks that don't depend on its own report: run it on data where you already know the answer, and give a fresh session only the result and ask it to break it.For a planet hunt I guess that means hiding a few fake planets in real data to see if it finds them, and running the same pipeline on shuffled data to see how many "planets" it finds in pure noise.
  • thatguy0900
    I truly cannot stand the dramatic way ai writes posts like this. It talks with the gravitas of someone announcing a world shaking event every time. It annoys me to no end.
  • VCFundedGenYer
    [flagged]