The search for planets outside our own solar system has unearthed more than 4,000 of them so far. The challenge in finding planets is that astronomers aren’t looking for the biggest, brightest or most unusual objects in the sky, as they usually do. As sources of mass and energy planets are relatively insignificant, and they are much dimmer than the stars they orbit, making them hard to discern. But astronomers have risen to the challenge.
New techniques in exoplanetary astronomy now in development will vastly increase the…
