This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: UCLA-led astronomers have discovered the first known "disappearing planet" about 1,000 light-years away. The planet, TOI-2535 b, is a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant that orbits extremely close to its host star.
TOI-2535 b whips around its star in only 8.25 days—10 times faster than the 88 days that Mercury takes to go around our sun once. Researchers observed TOI-2535 b transit its star multiple times over seven years, until they stopped seeing it altogether. But as they show in an article published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the planet hasn't truly vanished.
Instead, gravity from a neighboring planet is tilting its orbit. TOI-2535 b was identified in images taken by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope of the TOI-2535 star system between April 2019 and March 2026. TESS discovers planets by measuring the small changes in a star's brightness that occur when a planet passes in front of its star, blocking a bit of its light.
These events, known as transits, require a precise alignment between the star, planet and our line of sight to be noticeable. TESS observed this region of the sky numerous times, allowing the astronomers to determine that the planet's transits did not follow a regular schedule like most other exoplanets but ran dramatically early or late by up to six hours. They also noticed that the transits were getting shorter and shallower over the years, until they failed to appear at all in 2026.
These clues indicate that the planet is being pulled by an unseen neighbor, whose orbit is tilted relative to that of TOI-2535 b. The astronomers' calculations show that the two planets make each other's orbits wobble like a top, causing each to circle its sun obliquely and vanish from view as the wobble tilts them out of alignment. "We think of the universe as resembling clockwork, where everything is regular, but that's not true.
If there are multiple planets in a system, they can affect each other's orbits. We know of a few systems that are like this," said Samuel Yee, a 51 Pegasi b postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and the paper's corresponding author. "This is the most extreme example we've seen because the two planets are interacting so strongly.
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