I’ve never been able to get my mind wrapped around the reason we can see what I take to be individual stars at 35 million light years away, but we can’t see a planet around a star three light years away just doesn’t make sense to me...
Scale, maybe? The smallest of stars are thousands of times larger than the largest of planets, aren't they? So planets are "seen" as their orbits transit the star on the Earth side. If the plane of the orbit isn't edge-on to Earth,