Direct Imaging: The Next Big Step in the Hunt for Exoplanets

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope revealed more than 4,600 planetary candidates over its brief lifetime. When almost 350 exoplanet scientists gathered in Hawaii earlier this month, Space.com asked several of them what they were most looking forward to. "The new technique now is direct imaging," Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Space.com.