What size space telescope would be required to view an earth-sized planet orbitting A. Centauri?
Hello Thalia: Well, in your thinking you have overlooked one of the basic problems that has hidden Exoplanets from mankind for years and years. Moons and Planets have no illumination of their own. Only Stars “SHINE” , or have their own illumination. When you look at a distant star you are blinded by the intensity of the light coming from the star and are unable to see anything around it. So…no telescope, regardless of size, would allow you to look at Alpha Centauri and see some of its planets. The only possible thing we might do is filter the star’s light way down and possibly see a black spot pass across the brilliant white spot that is the star. The planet would be a black spot (ordinarily) because it was blocking light from the star. Digging deeper into the way things actually work, however, it might be possible to detect some color around the edges of the black spot if the distant planet was maybe a huge gas ball like Jupiter or Saturn in our Solar System. The problems our scient
