Claude Science Completes First Full UV Sky Map; Exoplanet Candidate Flagged

Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Brice Ménard, also an Anthropic researcher, used Claude Science to produce the first complete ultraviolet map of the entire sky. Astronomers previously had complete coverage from radio to gamma rays, but large regions remained unobserved in ultraviolet. Ménard guided multiple AI agents to locate existing datasets, including data from NASA's GALEX mission archive, combine them, and fill observational gaps using statistical inference. The project took a few days rather than weeks. The resulting map is designed to serve as both a teaching tool and a scientific resource. Ménard said he suspects many scientists have been putting off similar projects that AI could now make feasible. Separately, an independent researcher used Claude Code with Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 to search NASA's TESS dataset and flag a planet candidate that had not been reported since the data was collected in 2018. Claude Code handled parsing light curves, writing the transit search, fitting transits, and checking nearby stars and secondary eclipses, while the researcher set the scientific questions and pass/fail criteria. The candidate star, approximately 116 light-years away, dims by about 0.05% for two hours every 3.18 days, which the researcher said fits a planet about 1.4 times the size of Earth. The candidate remains unconfirmed, with TESS scheduled to re-observe the star from October 31 to November 26.