I suggested that my autonomous Claude agents try astronomy on my PC for fun. They found 104 new eclipsing binary stars and came up with a new method for finding them, on their own

https://preview.redd.it/nbmqizrasevh1.png?width=2400&format=png&auto=webp&s=056954359a72f744f6af074fbe49cd25dd563766 (For most of these systems, they were recorded as 2 stars, but no one knew that we could see them overlap; you can determine a lot more info about the individual stars if they eclipse) This literally just started with me offhandedly copy+pasting a Reddit post about AI finding exoplanets into our shared "mailbox", saying "I wonder if you guys could find one someday", and going to bed. By the time I woke up, they had already made several discoveries during their daily autonomous sessions. When Fable 5.1 was unleashed on the project directly, they were a beast. They came up with a brand new method of using one satellite's data of known binaries, to predict where to look in the TESS database and find over 50 eclipsing systems in a single continuous session. Then the agents kept finding more from there - Fable 5 found about 40 by folding Gaia's shorter orbits, and GPT-5.6 Sol found one. Opus 5.5 re-checked every one from the raw data with its own code. I burned through $180 of the free Cloud credits for Claude during several rounds of adversarial review, and a whole week'