At the cold frontier of our solar system, two of humanity's most sophisticated instruments have peered into the ancient dark beyond Neptune and found something unexpected: not abundance, but absence. The James Webb and Hubble space telescopes jointly detected 27 of the faintest trans-Neptunian objects ever directly observed, yet the scarcity of small bodies where theory predicted many raises a quiet but profound challenge to our understanding of how worlds are born. In science, what is missing can matter as much as what is found — and this gap between expectation and observation may be asking