Microlensing

Okay, so imagine you're playing with your magnifying glass in your backyard. You know how you can use it to make things look bigger, right? Well, astronomers use a similar trick called microlensing to find planets and other objects that are really far away in space.

Here's how it works: imagine you have a really bright light, like a star. Now, imagine that there's another object, like a planet, that's orbiting around that star. As the planet goes behind the star (from our point of view on Earth), it bends the light from the star and makes it look brighter for a little bit. This is because the planet is acting like a magnifying glass and bending the star's light towards us.

Now, this change in brightness is really small - we're talking about a change of just 0.01% or less! But astronomers have really good telescopes that can detect even these tiny changes. By studying these changes in brightness over time, astronomers can figure out how big the planet is and how far away it is from its star.

Microlensing is a really cool tool that astronomers use to study planets that are really far away in space. It's like looking through a magnifying glass to see things you couldn't see otherwise!