Humanity’s growing tally of exoplanets — worlds seen orbiting other stars — stands at 4,151. Most were found indirectly, as they passed in front of their stars and cast a telltale shadow, or as they caused their star to wobble as they swung around it. Only 50 have been directly imaged through a telescope.

Directly imaging an exoplanet was first achieved in two discoveries announced simultaneously in 2008. Multiple worlds were seen around the star HR 8799 through ground-based telescopes, and a solitary planet dancing around the star Fomalhaut was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope. Fomalhaut b, as the latter was named, appeared to be a colossal world, potentially as massive as three Jupiters, zipping along the inner edge of a giant doughnut of debris.

Perusing a decade of Hubble’s observations, some scientists now say that planet Fomalhaut b never existed.

András Gáspár, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, was looking at Hubble’s images of the Fomalhaut system taken up through 2014, on the off chance that someone missed something. To his surprise, Fomalhaut b was nowhere to be found in 2014. Starting with the original 2004 and 2006 Hubble shots that led to the exoplanet’s identification, he flicked forward in time and noticed that it appeared to expand and fade away.