The array was a hundred yards long. Six cup-shaped minors, each a yard across, were spaced along a spider-web boom. The mirrors were pointed away from Sol. The array was looking for planets, of other stars. For three months now, it had maintained its focus on a young blue-white star, as bright as any in the sky: twenty-seven light years from Sol, fifty times as luminous as Sol in its remote heyday. The six mirrors gathered the star’s scattered photons and focused them on a single collector. The design was subtle. The collector operated in the infrared part of the spectrum, where planets shone most brightly. Even so, the star was still millions of times brighter than any planet; but light waves arrived at the six mirrors slightly out of phase and canceled each other out, allowing planetary light to shine through. The images formed were ghostly, faint, building up layer by layer. There proved to be twelve major planets in the new system: three gas giants, the rest rocky or icy worlds. Of the smaller worlds, two lay in the habitable zone for Earth-like life—seven times as far as Earth from Sol—and one lay further out, in a region which might support ammono-like life.
