Have you ever heard of a planet vanishing into thin air? In 2008, astronomers discovered a planet named Dagon in a star system called Fomalhaut. However, when they checked the same images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2020, they found that the planet had vanished. Yes, you read that right – vanished! But did it really disappear, or is there something more to the story?

From the very beginning, Dagon was an enigma. It shouldn’t have existed at all, considering Fomalhaut is too young for planets to form around it. Fomalhaut is just around 400 million years old, and it’s still surrounded by a proto-planetary disk of gas, ice, and dust. The first planets to appear around Fomalhaut should be superheated and glow in the infrared. Instead, Dagon emits ultraviolet light. The planet lies at the very edge of the disk that encircles Fomalhaut, and its mass and orbit are still unknown.

The strangest thing about Dagon is its size. Since its discovery, its diameter has been gradually increasing, and its luminosity has been slowly fading. It looks like the planet didn’t just vanish but dissipated. How could this happen? What could destroy a planet like Dagon?

There have been other instances where NASA specialists have seen exoplanets disappear, such as Gliese 3470b, a gas giant the size of our Neptune. The planet lies almost 6 million kilometers away from its star, and due to its close proximity, the star’s intense energy heats the atmosphere of Gliese 3470b so much that it simply evaporates and scatters across the galaxy. Another exoplanet, WASP-12b, is even more unfortunate, as it’s being devoured by its own star.

But Dagon is different. It’s four times farther from Fomalhaut than Neptune is from our Sun, which means that its temperature couldn’t rise so much that it would start evaporating. So what happened to it? Could it be that scientists made a mistake and there never was a planet Dagon in the first place?

A similar story happened once around exoplanet Alpha Centauri BB. It was discovered in 2012 by astronomers using a high-accuracy spectrograph called HARPS. Scientists detected fluctuations of the radial velocity of the star, which could only emerge due to a planet’s gravity revolving around it. However, subsequent observations failed to confirm the planet’s existence.

So, did Dagon really disappear? Or was it a mistake, just like Alpha Centauri BB? Perhaps we need to study more data to solve this mystery. After all, the universe is full of surprises, and who knows what else is out there waiting to be discovered?

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