A giant gas planet roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth has seemingly disappeared before astronomers' eyes, and scientists now know why.

TOI-2535 b, a scorching "hot Jupiter" orbiting its star every 8.25 Earth days — nearly ten times faster than Mercury circles the sun — was tracked by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite for seven years between April 2019 and March 2026.

Researchers led by UCLA announced Monday that the planet is the first known "disappearing planet": its transits grew unpredictable, then stopped entirely in March 2026. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The universe is often imagined as clockwork, with planets following perfectly regular orbits, but TOI-2535 b broke that expectation dramatically. Over time its crossings arrived as much as six hours early or late, grew shorter and fainter, and then ceased altogether.

"We think of the universe as resembling clockwork, where everything is regular, but that's not true," said Samuel Yee, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow and the study's corresponding author.

"This is the most extreme example we've seen because the two planets are interacting so strongly. The planet's orbit is tilting so quickly that its transit disappeared while we were watching."

The planet hasn't been destroyed or ejected — it is locked in an intense gravitational wrestling match with a second, hidden planet in the same system.

As the two worlds pull on one another, their orbits wobble like a spinning top, and that wobble eventually tilted TOI-2535 b so it no longer passes between its star and Earth's line of sight.

The phenomenon resembles what makes solar eclipses rare on Earth: a tilted orbit means the bodies only occasionally line up. Additional observations came from the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

The discovery offers rare insight into how hot Jupiters end up orbiting so close to their stars. Because gas giants need abundant ice to form, they must be born far out and migrate inward, either through violent gravitational encounters or by slowly spiraling in within a flat protoplanetary disk.

The gentle route was thought to keep orbital planes flat, but the extreme tilt of TOI-2535 b shows flat systems can be twisted later in life without a catastrophe. "Because TOI-2535 b has a close neighbor, it probably migrated by slowly spiraling in instead of getting flung in," Yee said.

TOI-2535 b is not expected to cross in front of its star again for at least 30 years as its orbit continues to shift, though the mysterious companion planet causing the disruption could become detectable much sooner.

In the meantime, scientists will try to decode what this extremely wobbling system says about how it formed, potentially revealing a rare formation channel.