a billion times brighter than the orbiting planet. This makes it nearly impossible to see planets against the star's glare.

The difficulty of observing such a dim planet so close to a bright star is the obstacle that has prevented astronomers from directly photographing exoplanets. To date, only a handful of exoplanets have been photographed. The first exoplanet to be photographed, 2M1207b, is in orbit around a star called 2M1207. Astronomers were only able to photograph