Thousands of planets orbit other stars, and almost none have ever been photographed. We found them by watching stars blink and wobble.
The blink
Stars are billions of times brighter than their planets, so instead of looking for the planet, astronomers watch the star. If a planet's orbit happens to carry it across the star's face, the star dims — barely. A Jupiter-sized world blocks about 1% of the light; an Earth-sized one, closer to 0.01%. Do it on schedule, orbit after orbit, and the repeating blink betrays the planet: its size from the depth of the dip, its year from the spacing. NASA's Kepler mission stared at one starfield for years and found planets by the thousand this way.
The wobble
A planet doesn't simply orbit its star — both orbit their common center of mass, so the star traces a tiny circle. We can't see the motion, but we can hear it in the starlight: as the star sways toward and away from us, its light shifts slightly blue, then slightly red — the same Doppler effect that changes a siren's pitch. The size of the shift reveals the planet's mass. The very first exoplanets around Sun-like stars were caught by this wobble in the 1990s.
From counting to reading
The census is done: planets outnumber stars in our galaxy, and worlds are the rule, not the exception. The frontier now is reading them. When a planet transits, a whisper of starlight filters through its atmosphere, and the missing colors are chemical fingerprints. This is how Webb detects water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane on worlds hundreds of light-years away — chemistry, read from a blink. The next word everyone is waiting to read is 'biosignature'.