Amateurs use Claude and Codex to find a new dwarf planet, launch $100K grant program
mjuric · x · 2026-11-12
Will Depue, Joshua Wolk and Luke Farritor launched Claudestronomy, a $100,000 macrogrants program funding amateur astronomy research with AI agents. Their first find: a new dwarf planet about a quarter of Pluto's width, orbiting twice as far out (well past Neptune) and roughly the 50th largest object in the solar system — hiding in public images for over a decade. The project offers compute plus Claude/Codex/Grok/Gemini credits and small grants to search free archives like TESS, Gaia, ZTF, DECam and WISE, and stresses that calibrated non-detections with completeness curves are valuable results too.
Related event: AI-assisted Discovery: New Dwarf Planet Candidate Found with Claude(4 posts)→
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