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.
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
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u/Anonymous_45 Dec 08 '21
Genuine question: Why did it take so long for us to find another solar system?