Menu
Home
People
Places
Arts
History
Plants & Animals
Science
Life & Culture
Technology
Reference.org
Methods of detecting exoplanets
open-in-new
<p>Methods of detecting exoplanets usually rely on indirect strategies – that is, they do not directly <a href="/facts/Astrophotography/NeWNUJEn">image</a> the planet but deduce its existence from another signal. Any <a href="/facts/Planet/rbPjE6Bx">planet</a> is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent <a href="/facts/Star/euBFuo07">star</a>. For example, a <a href="/facts/Star/euBFuo07">star</a> like the <a href="/facts/Sun/CadPCVHh">Sun</a> is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the <a href="/facts/Glare_(vision)/AzWTpN9x">glare</a> from the parent star washes it out. For those reasons, very few of the <a href="/facts/Exoplanet/zjfmqfUf">exoplanets</a> reported as of June 2025 have been detected directly, with even fewer being resolved from their host star. </p>