When astronomers talk about directly imaging an exoplanet that is orbiting a far away star, the analogy they most commonly go with is trying to spot a fireflight next to a massive search light. An Earth-like exoplanet is incredibly dim - usually between 100 million and 10 billion times fainter than its host star. Understandably, that makes them very difficult to see. But a new paper from Hyunsoo Choi of Hanyang University in South Korea and his co-authors, which is available in pre-print on arXiv, describes a theoretical solution - use a mix of smart computer algorithms and quantum physics.