Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the light from the parent star causes a glare that washes it out. For those reasons, fewer than 5% of the extrasolar planets known as of November 2011 have been observed directly.
Instead, astronomers have generally had to resort to indirect methods to detect extrasolar planets. At the present time, several different indirect methods have yielded success.
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