Detecting exoplanets was frontier science not long ago. But now we’ve found over 5,000 of them, and we expect to find them around almost every star. The next step is to characterize these planets more fully in hopes of finding ones that might support life. Directly imaging them will be part of that effort.
But to do that, astronomers need to block out the light from the planets’ stars. That’s challenging in binary star systems.
Continue reading “It’s Already Hard Enough to Block a Single Star’s Light to See its Planets. But Binary Stars? Yikes”