{"id":246998,"date":"2026-11-10T06:44:55","date_gmt":"2026-11-10T12:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/first-known-disappearing-planet-has-a-neighbor-that-makes-it-wobble-like-a-top"},"modified":"2026-11-10T06:44:55","modified_gmt":"2026-11-10T12:44:55","slug":"first-known-disappearing-planet-has-a-neighbor-that-makes-it-wobble-like-a-top","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/first-known-disappearing-planet-has-a-neighbor-that-makes-it-wobble-like-a-top","title":{"rendered":"First known \u2018disappearing planet\u2019 has a neighbor that makes it wobble like a top"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>UCLA-led astronomers have discovered the first known \u201cdisappearing planet\u201d about 1,000 light-years away. The planet, TOI-2535 b, is a \u201chot Jupiter,\u201d a gas giant that orbits extremely close to its host star. TOI-2535 b whips around its star in only 8.25 days\u201410 times faster than the 88 days that Mercury takes to go around our sun once.<\/p>\n<p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/2041-8213\/aeb4a4\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/i>, the planet hasn\u2019t truly vanished. Instead, gravity from a neighboring planet is tilting its orbit.<\/p>\n<p>TOI-2535 b was identified in images taken by NASA\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>UCLA-led astronomers have discovered the first known \u201cdisappearing planet\u201d about 1,000 light-years away. The planet, TOI-2535 b, is a \u201chot Jupiter,\u201d a gas giant that orbits extremely close to its host star. TOI-2535 b whips around its star in only 8.25 days\u201410 times faster than the 88 days that Mercury takes to go around our [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}