Autonomous Claude agents find 104 new eclipsing binary stars and invent their own detection method
kaityl3 · reddit · 2026-10-14
Reddit user kaityl3 casually pasted a post about AI finding exoplanets into a shared 'mailbox' with autonomous Claude agents. Overnight, the agents began making discoveries, ultimately finding 104 new eclipsing binary systems and inventing a new method:
- Fable 5.1 used one satellite's data of known binaries to predict where to look in TESS, finding 50+ eclipsing systems in a single continuous session.
- Fable 5 folded Gaia's shorter orbits to find 40 more; GPT-5.6 Sol found one; Opus 5.5 re-verified every candidate from raw data with its own code.
Most systems were recorded as two stars, but nobody knew their eclipses were observable — eclipses reveal far more about the individual stars. Cost: $180 of free Cloud credits spent on adversarial review rounds, plus a week's worth of $100 Claude Max usage burned in days. The paper draft is on GitHub (eclipses-by-appointment) and submitted to AAVSO.
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