Reddit user reports possible planet candidate found with Claude Code

A Reddit user says they identified a possible planet candidate in data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), with help from Claude Code. The object has not been confirmed as a planet.

The user reports that its host star is about 116 light-years away and dims by roughly 0.05% for about two hours every 3.18 days. The same signal appears in separate TESS observations from 2018, 2020 and late 2025. If the candidate is a planet, the user estimates it is about 1.4 times Earth’s size.

The analysis included 74 separate analyses and more than 1,000 scripts over about two weeks, according to the post. The user says they searched 36 catalogs and literature sources, as well as 340,505 automated TESS planet-search alerts, and found no report of the signal. They also describe testing predictions against withheld observations and say independent reviews came from Codex and separate agent sessions.

A second, weaker candidate around the same star is described as roughly 2.2 Earth radii, with an 11.13-day orbit. The user says a TESS observing proposal was approved under Program #100 and that the predicted transit times and pass/fail criteria were published on October 6, before new observations. TESS is scheduled in the post to observe the star again from October 31 to November 26; the post does not establish whether those observations have confirmed the candidate.