Now wait a minute. We are finding planets several light years away, but can not find one on the edge of our own solar system? That makes no sense what so ever.
There’s no nearby star whose “wiggles” can be detected.
Because if it’s there, it’s cold, it’s dark, and thus very hard to spot with visible and IR scopes.
They don’t actually see those planets, they see them wobble. The more the wobble, the more the mass of the planet. The frequency of the wobble explains how fast the planet orbits the star. Most of these planets are very large. Larger than Jupiter.
It would be more difficult to observe a brown dwarve star in our region of space because it is basically dark and we would not be able to observe much wobble from our sun or other planets in the solar system from our vantage point. If we were observing the Sun from the Andromeda galaxy, it would probably be obvious if we had a companion star or not.
Disclaimer1: I am not a scientist but I watch Netflix/Nova.
Disclaimer2: I do not endorse/deny this theory because of disclaimer 1.
If you understand how planet detection is done, it makes perfect sense. Astronomers look for a "wobble" in the path of a distant star as it moves in its orbit.
To see that very tiny wobble requires a very long distance separation between the "measuring point" and what is being measured.
The earth is simply too close to our own sun to be able to detect that "wobble" in ITS path.