Earth's turbulent, starlight - blurring atmosphere is also a severe obstacle to imaging faint planets from ground - based observatories, and most experts agree that the solution is to use space telescopes. (scientificamerican.com)
The instrument, called the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), was designed, built, and optimized for imaging faint planets next to bright stars and probing their atmospheres, and studying dusty disks around young stars. (seti.org)
By removing much of the starlight in this way, astronomers hope to detect very faint planets circling the star or achieve precision measurements of the stellar surface — feats that otherwise would require a single mirror hundreds of feet across. (discovermagazine.com)