Some rabbit holes are a thousand light-years deep. This one starts with a planet that showed up on schedule for years, then simply stopped showing up.

The planet is called TOI-2535 b. It's a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant about the size of Jupiter that hugs its star so tightly it goes around in about eight and a quarter days. That's 10 times faster than Mercury's 88-day trip around our Sun. Its star is about 1,000 light-years away, in the constellation Corvus.

We can't see the planet directly. What we can see is its shadow, sort of. NASA's TESS space telescope hunts planets by watching stars for tiny dips in brightness. When a planet passes in front of its star from our point of view, it blocks a little light. Astronomers call that a transit. It only works if the star, the planet's orbit and our line of sight happen to line up.

For TOI-2535 b, they lined up. Then they didn't.

What happened

Fact: TESS looked at the TOI-2535 system in five separate stretches between April 2019 and March 2026. The planet was first flagged by a team called the WINE collaboration and later confirmed as a real planet with telescopes on the ground.

Fact: The transits never kept good time. Instead of arriving like clockwork every orbit, they came as much as six hours early or six hours late.

Fact: The transits also got shorter and shallower every time TESS came back. In 2019 the planet crossed near the middle of its star. Over the next few years its path slid toward the edge, then it only clipped the rim, and by the last TESS look in 2026 there was no clear transit at all. The research team says the planet's path likely swept across more than half the face of the star in just seven years.

Fact: The paper calls TOI-2535 b the first confirmed planet orbiting a single star whose transits have been directly observed to disappear. Astronomers have seen planets with drifting transits before. This is the first one caught fading all the way out.

So where did it go?

Nowhere. That's the twist.

Fact: The team, led by Samuel Yee and Erik Petigura at UCLA, modeled the timing and shape changes together with radial velocity measurements (the star's tiny back-and-forth wobble) from the NEID instrument on the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. The best explanation is a second planet nearby, probably at least as massive as Saturn, on an orbit tilted at least about 5 degrees compared to TOI-2535 b's.

Fact: The two planets tug on each other, and the tilt makes both orbits wobble like a spinning top, over periods of decades. As the wobble turned, it tipped TOI-2535 b's orbit out of our line of sight. The planet is still out there circling its star. We're just looking at it from the wrong angle now.

"We think of the universe as resembling clockwork, where everything is regular, but that's not true," Yee said in UCLA's release. "The planet's orbit is tilting so quickly that its transit disappeared while we were watching."

Petigura compared it to something you've seen yourself. If the Moon's orbit lined up perfectly with Earth's orbit around the Sun, we'd get an eclipse every month. Because the Moon's orbit is tilted, eclipses are rare. Same geometry, bigger planets.

What's still open

Inferred, not seen: Nobody has spotted the neighbor yet. Its existence and rough mass come from the way it pushes TOI-2535 b around. The team says the neighbor may actually come into view, transiting the star itself, before TOI-2535 b does.

Prediction: TOI-2535 b should start transiting again sometime in the next 30 to 50 years. That's a prediction you can check, which is exactly what you want from a good explanation.

Open question: How did it get there? Hot Jupiters probably form farther out and move in. One route is violent, where the planet gets flung into a stretched-out orbit and the star drags it closer. The other is slow, riding inward through the disk of gas and dust around a young star. "Because TOI-2535 b has a close neighbor, it probably migrated by slowly spiraling in instead of getting flung in," Yee said. That's the team's read, and it isn't settled.

The old trick behind the new find

Finding an invisible planet by the way it pushes another one around isn't new. In the 1840s, Uranus wasn't moving quite the way it should. French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier worked out where an unknown planet would have to be to explain it, and Johann Galle at the Berlin Observatory found Neptune on his first night of looking, in 1846. Same idea, 180 years later, a thousand light-years away.

The verdict

SOLVED. The planet didn't blink out of existence, get swallowed, or fall through a hole in space. Gravity from a tilted neighbor is rocking its orbit, and for the next few decades that orbit points the wrong way for us to see it. Mark your calendar for somewhere between 2056 and 2076.

Sources

1. UCLA Newsroom, Holly Ober, "First known 'disappearing planet' has a neighbor that makes it wobble like a top," Nov. 9, 2026. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/first-known-disappearing-planet-neighbor-wobble-like-top
2. Space.com, Robert Lea, "A distant exoplanet mysteriously vanished from sight. Astronomers just discovered why," Nov. 10, 2026. https://www.space.com/astronomy/exoplanets/a-distant-exoplanet-mysteriously-vanished-from-sight-astronomers-just-discovered-why
3. Sci.News, Natali Anderson, "Astronomers Watch Exoplanet's Transits Vanish for First Time," Nov. 10, 2026. https://www.sci.news/astronomy/vanishing-transits-toi-2535b-15188.html
4. Samuel W. Yee et al., "A TESS Disappearing Act: The Vanishing Transits of TOI-2535b," The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1011, L60 (2026).
5. NASA Science, "Neptune: Facts." https://science.nasa.gov/neptune/facts/

Fact note: UCLA gives the orbit as 8.25 days; the paper's best-fit period is 8.236 days. The paper calls the host an old, early K dwarf. Sci.News places it in Corvus, which matches the star's coordinates. The companion planet has not been observed directly; its properties are inferred from modeling.