how are we able to see planets that are 100’s of lightyears away? By continually increasing the magnification of a telescope? How do we know anything about the planets atmosphere if it’s that far away? For example, the Corot-7b, we are told it rains rocks there.
In: Technology
We cannot see them, we can see a spot of light of unknown size. That spot could get dimmer and brighter, we can measure that, and calculate the size of a planet passing it, or if it’s multiple planets, etc.
We can measure the star wobbling because it’s relative velocity to us changes and we see a color change from that, we can calculate if a planet is causing this.
And in some cases we can even measure light that came from a non-star and determine that it’s a planet. The plant is lit up by the star, and bounces off the planet to us, we get the light, but we can’t differentiate position of the planet from the star. What we can see is that the color of the planet is periodically added to the stars light and then not added, so we again see a change in color of the star, and we can determine that this is due to a planet, and the color of the planet (which we can use to tell if it has water on it or something)
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