Claude agent finds dwarf planet candidate in public sky data; $100K grants launched
jzlegion · x · 2026-11-12
- Will Depue, Joshua Wolk and Luke Farritor used Claude and Codex to mine public telescope archives, announcing a dwarf planet candidate 1/4 the width of Pluto, orbiting twice as far out (beyond Neptune), potentially the 50th largest known solar system object — sitting unnoticed in public images for over a decade.
- They launched Claudestronomy, an independent macrogrants project (not affiliated with major labs) offering $100,000 in grants plus compute and Claude/Codex/Grok/Gemini credits for amateur searches of TESS, Gaia, ZTF, DECam, WISE and HSC public data.
- Thesis: archives are full of objects missed by past searches' parameters, and anyone with a laptop and an agent can help find them.
Related event: AI Agents Help Discover Dwarf Planet Candidate in Public Telescope Data(3 posts)→
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