In recent years, the media has been filled with news about the thousands of extrasolar planets found by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft as it monitors the brightness of hundreds of thousands of stars looking for transits. Because of the wide net cast by Kepler in its primary and now its “K2” extended mission, most of those exoplanets discoveries are many hundreds of light years away or more. Inevitably the lay public asks “why aren’t astronomers looking for exoplanets around stars closer to us… maybe someplace we might have a chance of reaching someday?”.
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