A hobbyist used Claude + ChatGPT to discover two new potential exoplanets; NASA will confirm in November.
A hobbyist utilized Claude and ChatGPT to identify two potential exoplanets, with NASA slated to confirm these discoveries in November. One of these planets is approximately 1.4 times Earth's size, likely rocky, and has a year lasting just over three days. It receives about 70 times more starlight than Earth, resulting in an extreme surface temperature of roughly 530 °C (1,000 °F), hot enough to melt lead. Data and code related to this discovery are available via a Zenodo DOI.
This report details the first instance of a hobbyist using AI models like Claude and ChatGPT to discover potential exoplanets, a task previously limited to professional astronomers.
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PublishedOffset at this time: UTC+0Oct 8, 2026, 22:40 UTC
IngestedOffset at this time: UTC+0Oct 9, 2026, 03:00 UTC
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- Oct 8, 2026, 22:40
- Ingested
- Oct 9, 2026, 03:00
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https://x.com/p_rabtsevich/status/2107803696058822742
NASA's TESS telescope watches thousands of stars and records how bright they are. Last month I was going through its data from late 2025, and one star kept getting a little dimmer every 3 days, for about two hours each time.
That's what you'd see if a planet were passing in front of the star and blocking a bit of its light. So I went back to older data on the same star, from 2020 and 2018. It was doing the same thing there. I timed 22 of these dimmings, and every one came on schedule.
The first planet is about 1.4 times the size of Earth. Planets that size are usually rocky. A year there lasts just over 3 days. It gets about 70 times more starlight than Earth, so it's roughly 530 °C there (about 1,000 °F), hot enough to melt lead.
There might be a second planet, a bit over twice Earth's size. It goes around every 11 days and it's cooler, around 260 °C (500 °F). I'm less sure about this one. November's data is its next test.
Two weeks of trying to prove myself wrong: 74 separate analyses and over 1,000 scripts, built with Claude Code and Codex. My favorite: I hid each year of data and let the other two predict when the star would dim. Right 3 times out of 3.
Then I checked whether anyone had found it before me. I went through 30+ sources, ran 550+ searches and checked 340k+ automatic alerts from NASA's own planet-hunting software. Neither planet shows up anywhere.
So I wrote a formal observing proposal to the TESS mission, and it was approved. When the telescope comes back to this part of the sky in November, it will record this star every 2 minutes.
It's listed as program #100: https://tess.mit.edu/science/ddt/
The star is TIC 4206066.
Fly around it in 3D: https://tic4206066.pages.dev
Write-up: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22967456
Data and code: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22999133