This post is absolutely going viral on Reddit

An independent researcher used Claude Code to find a possible new planet. It had been sitting in NASA's TESS data since 2018, and he could find no earlier report of it.

Claude Code with Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 did most of the work: parsing the light curves, writing the transit search, fitting transits, checking nearby stars and secondary eclipses. He set the questions and the pass/fail rules.

The star is about 116 light-years away. Every 3.18 days it dims by about 0.05% for two hours, which fits a planet about 1.4 times the size of Earth. It is still a candidate, and TESS will check it again from Oct 31 to Nov 26.