I may have found two new Earth-sized planets in our galaxy this morning!
Inspired by yesterday’s reddit thread on how someone used Claude Code to find a new planet, I spent this morning searching NASA TESS data on nearby stars that TESS scanned less thoroughly (at low cadence).
To my surprise the pipeline discovered two previously undocumented exoplanet candidates:
• TIC 370612437 (Cygnus constellation, 158 light-years): dims by 0.02% every 3.56 days → ~1.0× Earth’s size.
• HIP 114417 (Andromeda constellation, 134 ly): 0.03% every 4.93 days → ~1.1× Earth.
The method to find them is to search for periodic dims in light coming from a star when a planet passes in front of it. For both the candidate exoplanets, the dip repeats 55 and 21 times respectively across 4 separate observing years (2019-2024).
These are obviously tentative and unconfirmed, but several signals point to them being credible candidates:
• same dip in NASA’s and MIT’s separate processing of the images
• hide one year’s dip and predict its times from rest of the dips (matched in 3 of 4 years)
• flip light curves to create fake signals and validate observed dips against it
The method and results were reviewed by independent agents: Codex and fresh Claude. Important caveat: a faint neighbouring pair of eclipsing stars could fake the dip, so these exoplanets remain candidates pending further verification.
What’s next: report to NASA’s ExoFOP as Community TESS Objects of Interest, so astronomers can verify. The next scan of these stars via TESS will happen in Aug 2027 - Apr 2028, if the preregistered dip predictions hold up, these are indeed strong candidates.
Nicknames for these exoplanets: Aakanksha (Sanskrit: aspiration) and Orbit (well, Orbit)