Claude replicates astronomer's 400-hour work in 30 minutes, finds hidden planetary system in old data

scottleibrand · x · 2026-10-11

A cited post notes Claude discovered at least three planets (9–13 Earth masses) orbiting a Sun-like star 158 light-years away near Orion's Belt — signals sitting unnoticed in public telescope data since 2016.
Author CJHandmer shares firsthand experience: he once spent enormous effort manually decoding Mars Viking GCMS raw data; recently a series of AI models replicated his hard-won results in 30 minutes without being given them, then pushed the entire problem to the limits of modern statistical methods.
Core argument: public datasets from NASA and similar agencies are underexploited because scientists lack time, resources, and incentives; scarce extreme software skill is now being unlocked by AI to mine legacy scientific data.

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