Exoplanet Discoveries

The Kepler telescope is discovering many planets by searching for changes in a star's brightness when a planet transits across the face of a star. However, with that method of observing planets, we cannot see any of the details of the planet. While Kepler may not be powerful enough to see details of the planet, maybe future telescopes, such as James Webb will. To see the details it will have to see the bright side of the planet, so it will have to see the planets while they are on the far side of the star. To do that they can use solar occlusion so that the light from the star will not interfere with the light from the planet. The diagram below shows how it could work.