David Kipping

Someone passed in front of a light.

And so that light in your eyes would just dim for a short moment.

Now, the reason we have that problem with blurriness or resolution is just because the stars are so far away.

I mean, the closest stars are four light years away, but most of the stars Kepa looked at were thousands of light years away.

And so there's absolutely no chance that the telescope can physically resolve the star or even the separation between the planet and the star is too small, especially for a telescope like Kepler.

It's only a meter across.

In principle, you can make those detections, but you need a different kind of telescope.

We call that direct imaging.

And direct imaging is a very exciting technology.

distinct way of detecting planets.

But it, as you can imagine, is going to be far easier to detect planets which are really far away from their star to do that, because that's going to make that separation really big.

And then you also want the star to be really close to us, so the nearest stars.

Not only that, but you would prefer that planet to be really hot, because the hotter it is, the brighter it is.

And so that tends to bias direct imaging towards plants which are in the process of forming.

So things which have just formed the planet still got all of its primordial heat embedded within it, and it's glowing.

We can see those quite easily.

But for the planets more like the Earth, of course, they've cooled down.

And so we can't see that the light is pitiful compared to a newly formed planet.

We would like to get there with direct imaging.

That's the dream, is to have the pale blue dot, an actual photograph of it, maybe even just a one-pixel photograph of it.