Transcript: Direct detection of planets is very difficult, but the situation can be improved by moving to infrared wavelengths. The Sun emits the peak of its radiation, by Wiens’s law, in visible light. By infrared wavelengths the energy distribution is falling off. Planets however are cooler. and the peak of their radiation, their intrinsic thermal radiation, is at infrared wavelengths. So by moving to infrared wavelengths the contrast of the planet with respect to the star, the Sun, is increased by as much as a factor of a thousand. This means that the visible light situation, where Jupiter reflects only a few billionths of the Sun’s light, is improved to a situation of reflecting a few millionths of the Sun’s light, a difficult experiment but not impossible.