To Photograph Distant Planets, Just Turn Off the Starlight

Although we can detect the planets orbiting distant stars through indirect methods, an optical image would provide much more information about how planets form and evolve. But those stars are so much brighter than the planets around them that the starlight simply drowns out the smaller orbs, like a flashlight beam in bright daylight. But now, researchers have developed an imaging system called Project 1640—a collaboration between the American Museum of Natural History, the California Institute of Technology, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—that can create a dark space around a planet to snap its photo.

Update, July 16: The Project 1640 researchers provided some more images showing how the system works, so we assembled them into the gallery below.

Images courtesy of Project 1640