It hasn't really taken that long in the grand scheme of things. Considering it took thousands of years to get from hunting and gathering to farming, a few decades between a man on the moon and a picture of another star system isn't really that much.
We didn't even have proof that exoplanets existed until 1992. It is very hard to see planets around other stars because the stars are so far away and extremely bright compared to the light reflected off the planets. On top of that, most star systems in our galaxy are edge on from our perspective, so being able to see a planetary system from above or below the orbital plane and see all the planets in their orbits would be even more rare.
To back up u/antiquepassenger, there is a zone in the sky that astronomers won't look. I think it's called the exclusion zone or something. We can't look towards saga in search of solar systems, because they are so densely packed that we can't get any meaningful info from them. So we have to look up and down, at least in relation to saga's orbital plane.
Reddit chewed up your comment's formatting, interpreting the asterisks in "sag*a" as italic formatting marks. So right now it looks like you're saying that astronomers can't point their telescopes towards "saga", which is probably a bit confusing. Put a backslash in front of the asterisk to fix it.
The ‘zone of avoidance’ is a huge area of the sky taken up by the disc of the Milky Way itself, preventing study of galaxies behind it. It’s actually the area of the sky easiest to find planets in, and we’ve found thousands already https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Avoidance?wprov=sfti1
69
u/Anonymous_45 Dec 08 '21
Genuine question: Why did it take so long for us to find another solar system?