How to find a planet you can’t see

Tiny wobbles and faint twinkles that have led astronomers to nearly 5,000 new worlds. Subscribe and turn on notifications 🔔 so you don’t miss any videos: For a tour of some of the odd exoplanets scientists have found, watch part one, here: Pluto was discovered in January of 1930, a tiny speck on a photographic plate (). It was the most distant world humans had ever seen. Decades later, even the powerful Hubble Space Telescope struggled to get a good look at the dwarf planet – the Hubble image of Pluto is just a sickly yellow smudge (). So when astronomers set out to search for planets around other stars (aka “exoplanets), they knew it wouldn’t be easy. Our closest neighbor, a little red dwarf named Proxima Centauri, is 7,000 times further away from us than Pluto. Any planets in orbit around it would likely get lost in the glare of bright starlight. “