[1] During 7 April to 4 June 2007,[a] telescopes of the Super Wide Angle Search for Planets (SuperWASP) and All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) projects automatically recorded V1400 Centauri undergoing a series of significant dimming events for 56 days.

[7] The pattern of these dimming events was complex yet nearly symmetrical, indicating they were caused by an opaque, disk-like structure eclipsing the star.

[4]: 1 [b] The event was not noticed until 3 December 2010,[4]: 5  when Mark J. Pecaut, a graduate student of Eric E. Mamajek at the University of Rochester, discovered V1400 Centauri's 2007 eclipse while investigating SuperWASP's public light curve database.

[8][9] Pecaut and Mamajek were originally intending to use the SuperWASP data to check for brightness variability in candidate low-mass stars of the Scorpius–Centaurus association, which they had been studying since 2009.

[12]: 423  Mamajek's team hypothesized that this substellar object could be orbiting V1400 Centauri as either an exoplanet or binary companion, although later studies have since disfavored this scenario.

[4]: 8  Although it is now considered obsolete, the hypothesis of J1407b being a substellar companion or exoplanet orbiting V1400 Centauri was popularized by Mamajek and Kenworthy in 2015, when they announced their research on J1407b in a press release published by their respective universities.

[4]: 8 Continuous observations of V1400 Centauri's brightness after 2007 did not show any signs of eclipse-like dimming, which rules out the possibility of near-circular and short-period orbits for J1407b.

[14]: 9  A more extensive analysis of V1400 Centauri's brightness in archival observations from 1890 to 1990 similarly found no signs of eclipses, ruling out 90% of possible orbital periods between 10 and 20 years for J1407b.

[24]: 7 A 2016 study by Steven Rieder and Matthew Kenworthy investigated the orbital dynamics of J1407b's postulated eccentric orbit and found that the disk of J1407b either fills a large fraction of or extends beyond J1407b's Hill radius (extent of J1407b's gravitational influence against V1400 Centauri) regardless of its mass, which meant that J1407b's disk could be easily destabilized by V1400 Centauri's gravitational influence whenever it makes its closest approach to the star at periapsis.

[16]: 4  Rieder and Kenworthy suggested that the lifetime of a retrograde-orbiting disk could be prolonged by dust-producing processes such as tidal disruption of comets around J1407b.

[8] In addition to this issue, the origin of a retrograde-orbiting disk together with J1407b's postulated eccentric orbit could not be easily explained by current theories for planetary formation.

[7]: 2  However, the existence of additional substellar companions beyond the distance of J1407b's supposed orbit had already been shown to be unlikely by Mamajek's team, who attempted a search for J1407b using various telescopes during 2012–2013.

[12]: 414–415  Doppler spectroscopy of V1400 Centauri showed no evidence of radial velocity variations that would be caused by a >12 MJ companion orbiting the star.

[12]: 422  Furthermore, continuous observations of V1400 Centauri's brightness over a 19-year timespan between 2001 and 2020 found no evidence of transits by Jupiter-sized exoplanets or substellar companions before and after J1407b's 2007 eclipse.

[14]: 9  They further argued that the existence of J1407b's massive disk implies that the object must be considerably younger than the stars surrounding its location, which makes it difficult to explain J1407b's origin.