Planets don’t usually blink out of existence. Once they’re there, they stay put. That is, unless you are the exoplanet known as TOI-2535 b, which vanished after years of observation.
Located around 1,000 light-years from Earth, TOI-2535 b is what astronomers call a “hot Jupiter,” meaning it’s a massive gas giant that orbits real close to its sun. According to a new study in Astrophysical Journal Letters, NASA’s TESS space telescope spent seven years tracking TOI-2535 b completing its blisteringly fast 8.25-day orbit.
And then it started acting strangely.
Where the Vanishing Planet went, according to scientists
The planet stopped running on schedule, showing up to its transits across its host star up to six hours early or late. The transits also started looking shorter and fainter. In March 2026, TOI-2535 b completely vanished from our telescopes.
Of course, planets don’t just up and disappear without a concrete explanation. Pretty sure there was no sci-fi wizardry going on here; researchers dug into the data for an explanation. It seems TOI-2535 b got yanked out of our line of sight by a neighbor we didn’t even know it had.
The numbers suggest an unseen second planet in the system is gravitationally bossing TOI-2535 b around. The pair of planets are in a gravitational tug-of-war that’s making their orbits wobble around like a top just about to topple over. The wobble tilted TOI-2535 b so severely that it no longer crosses in front of its star from our vantage point here on Earth.
According to Samuel Yee, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, this is the most extreme example of planetary interaction astronomers have ever witnessed. While we like to imagine the universe as a perfectly organized clockwork machine, sometimes it’s a wobbly, unpredictable mess that makes an entire planet seem to vanish before our eyes.
Astronomers don’t expect TOI-2535 b to swing back into our view for at least another 30 to 50 years.
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