The Sun as a lens: A new method for taking high-resolution photographs of exoplanets

The universe is damn large and, in comparison, everything that exists inside it is extremely small. Sometimes, astronomers are lucky and get some help in their observations of, for example, an individual star in a far-away galaxy: help delivered by the gravity of other massive objects, which refract and amplify the light of even-more distant objects like a lens. The effect is called a gravitational lens.

This effect, however, has one big disadvantage: we cant intentionally create a...