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.
时间与来源
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发布当时偏移：UTC+02026年10月8日 22:40 UTC
收录当时偏移：UTC+02026年10月9日 03:00 UTC
- 发布
- 2026年10月8日 22:40
- 收录
- 2026年10月9日 03:00
- 来源类型
- 开发者社区
- 档位
- 社区
- 信源状态
- 正常
档位是按信源手工设定的编辑判断，不是逐条打分。
讨论趋势
百分比基于采集到的讨论信号，不代表新增评论数或独立参与人数。曲线仅用于同一话题在不同时段的比较。
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