Hidden in telescope archives for 12 years: three amateurs use Claude to find a dwarf planet candidate
First seen on X 2 days ago@Polymarket ♥ 1,4734 views
Three amateurs using Claude and Codex on public telescope data say they have found a dwarf planet candidate about 590 km wide, twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, they announced on Nov. 11.
Joshua Wolk wrote that they first spotted it in 2025 data from Chile's Rubin Observatory, but for a week it oddly failed to appear in any older survey. Then Claude Fable 5.2, released mid-analysis, found a bug in their orbit code. After the fix they tested 50 billion orbits against old public images and got one hit: the object appears in 13 archival images from 2013 to 2019 taken by the Dark Energy Camera and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. One orbit fits all 12 years of positions to within 0.08 arcseconds.
Its size is estimated at 462 to 707 km and could exceed 1,000 km. It travels an eccentric orbit between 32 and 79 AU and takes 410 years to go around the Sun. It has been filed with the Minor Planet Center and has no name yet. Wolk said Mario Juric of Rubin's Solar System team verified the find. It is a borderline dwarf planet candidate because its shape, whether it has pulled itself round, is not yet known.
Collaborator Will DePue launched claudestronomy, a $100,000 program of grants for people hunting new objects in public sky data, most of which, such as TESS, Gaia and ZTF, is free to download. Polymarket's post on the find drew more than 1,400 likes, with replies like "So for 12 years, actual scientists had no clue?" and "Astrophysicists everywhere now."
“JUST IN: Vibecoder uses Claude to discover a potential dwarf planet located twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, hidden in public telescope data for 12 years.”
