Giant Planet Vanishes From View as an Unseen Neighbor Tilts Its Orbit

A gas giant about 1,000 light-years from Earth has slipped out of sight while astronomers were watching it. According to EarthSky, the planet, TOI-2535 b, did not really go anywhere: the gravity of another, unseen planet has tilted its orbit so far that it no longer passes in front of its star as seen from Earth. The next visible pass is not expected for another 30 to 50 years.

Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) published the peer-reviewed findings in The Astrophysical Journal on Nov. 9, 2026.

What astronomers saw

TOI-2535 b is a hot Jupiter, a gas giant similar to Jupiter in mass and makeup that circles extremely close to its star. It completes an orbit in just 8.25 days. Mercury, the innermost planet of our solar system, takes 88 days.

Astronomers first found the planet in data from NASA's TESS space telescope, which spots planets by catching the small dimming that occurs when one crosses its star, an event called a transit. They tracked TOI-2535 b over seven years. During that time its transits were off schedule, arriving earlier or later than expected by up to six hours, and they grew shorter and shallower. Then, earlier this year, the transits stopped.

The unseen planet

From the pattern of those changes, the team concluded that another planet, not yet observed, must be tugging on TOI-2535 b. That planet's orbit is tilted relative to the first planet's. The pull goes both ways: each planet makes the other wobble like a top. Because both circle the star at an angle, there are times when their orbits fall out of alignment and the planet no longer crosses our line of sight.

Lead author Samuel Yee of UCLA said astronomers tend to picture the universe as clockwork, but planets in the same system can affect each other. He said this is “the most extreme example we’ve seen” because the two planets interact so strongly that the transit vanished within the span of the observations.

A comparison with eclipses

Co-author Erik Petigura offered an everyday comparison. If the Moon's orbit lined up perfectly with Earth's orbit around the sun, eclipses would occur every month. The Moon's orbit is tilted, so they are rarer. Petigura said that tilt is a relic of the Moon's violent formation in a collision with the early Earth.

Why it matters

Hundreds of hot Jupiters are known, but most have no neighbor close enough to disturb their orbits this way. This one offers a clue to how such planets form. Early models held that hot Jupiters needed a lot of ice to form, which means they began far from their stars and migrated inward.

The researchers weighed two scenarios, EarthSky reported. In one, a Jupiter-like world nearly collides with another planet, and the encounter flings it into an elliptical orbit like the one seen here. In the other, all the planets are pulled inward through the disk of material from which they formed. That second path should leave a flat system with all orbits on one plane, but the two planets in this system have tilted orbits. That makes the first scenario more likely, according to the researchers.

For readers, the finding is a reminder that planetary systems are not always tidy. Even a large, well-studied planet can drop out of view when a hidden neighbor reshapes its path.

What happens next

TOI-2535 b is expected to stay hidden for some time. The researchers said the unseen neighbor could come into view sooner than the 30 to 50 years it may take for TOI-2535 b to transit again.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by EarthSky