How I discovered an Exoplanet & the science apocalypse

TL;DR: I discovered (a few) exoplanet candidates, I walk through how. Then I talk about the near future of science given the ease of and growing capabilities of agentic systems. These are largely independent sections, you can skip ahead. LLM Usage: All text was generated by a Human Language Model, the discovery itself was done mostly by Claude Opus 5.5. The widgets are all Claudeslop code but they really do help with the explanation so please bear with them. Exoplanet The T ransiting E xoplanet S urvey S atellite ( TESS ) was built for detecting exoplanets. Each month (27 days) TESS focuses on a different patch of the sky, and every 200 seconds its wide field-of-view cameras repeat their observations of that particular patch of the celestial sphere. In 2023 NASA estimated that TESS has photographed over 93% of the night sky at least once. TESS's observational sectors, from NASA's "How to find an Exoplanet with TESS data" In one of these sectors (55 to be exact [1] ), there's a star elegantly named TIC 423560969. Given that TESS is made to scan large swaths of the night sky very quickly, the resolution isn't too great, yet as you'll see there's still a pretty clear signal that can be extracted. We can make a time-lapse of the month during which the star was recorded by TESS. It's not particularly illuminating. There's a lot of noise and being 2,300 light-years away doesn't help. It's not perceptible when a transit (partial eclipse) is happening. TESS actually scanned this sta…