Research

Hunt for exoplanet candidates in public telescope data with Claude Code

A Reddit post, widely discussed on HN, describes an amateur using Claude Code to search public data and find what he thinks is an unknown planet.

By pyduan on Hacker News · Posted · Added Oct 16, 2026 · 2 sources

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Engagement
301 HN points132 comments · fetched Oct 15, 2026

What they did

The poster used Claude Code to pull and analyze public astronomy data and look for a planet signal.

How it went

He reports a candidate he believes nobody had catalogued. That is a claim, not a confirmed discovery.

Worth knowing

Candidates need professional follow-up; HN commenters debated it.

Builder recipe

Our own starting point, written from the source. Adapt it to your setup.

Stack

  • Claude Code
  • Public telescope data
  • Python

Steps

  1. Define the question and success criteria.
  2. Let agents search, run or summarize in parallel.
  3. Verify key results yourself.
  4. Write up findings with sources.

Starter prompt

Download public light curves for [target list], search for periodic transit dips, and show me each candidate with the plot and false-positive checks.

Tags

Tool Python
Industry Science

Read the original

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