Because planets that could maybe, possibly, potentially contain life are infinitely more interesting than things like asteroids or comets, astronomers spend a significant amount of time searching for them. Now, they’ve run into a problem: The creatively-named Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has detected exozodiacal dust around nearby stars with exoplanets in the habitable range, making high-res direct imaging difficult.

Exozodiacal light is created when starlight reflects off of exozodiacal dust, the debris created when asteroid-like bodies called planetesimals collide. In fact, the Earth version (known as zodiacal light) is visible from Earth on a clear, dark night. The light and dust are expected to diffuse as time goes by, so the fact that the new study observed some of the highest brightness and density levels on record suggests that some of these nearby solar systems may be younger than our own.

However, this wasn’t the case – most of the exozodiacal dust was found in older star systems.

“If we want to study the evolution of Earth-like planets close to the habitable zone, we need to observe the zodiacal dust in this region around other stars,” said Steve Ertel, lead author of the paper, from ESO and the University of Grenoble in France. “Detecting and characterising this kind of dust around other stars is a way to study the architecture and evolution of planetary systems.”

The problem with the discovery of all this previously undetected dust is that it may seriously hinder the search for Earth-like planets using direct imaging. Though it’s only detectable at these distances with an instrument as powerful as the VLTI, it’s still about 1,000 times brighter than our zodiacal light, and therefore a problem.

“The high detection rate found at this bright level suggests that there must be a significant number of systems containing fainter dust, undetectable in our survey, but still much brighter than the Solar System’s zodiacal dust,” explains Olivier Absil, co-author of the paper, from the University of Liège. “The presence of such dust in so many systems could therefore become an obstacle for future observations, which aim to make direct images of Earth-like exoplanets.”