In 2025, the JWST will likely shed more light into these tantalizing detections, and hopefully confirm, for the first time ever, if there is life on alien worlds light-years away from our own.
Exoplanets are incredibly hard to find - let alone closely examine - because they produce virtually no light of their own and get outshined by nearby stars.
Cool red dwarfs like TRAPPIST-1 make good study candidates, however, because their light is fairly faint. Still, the challenge remains significant, not least of all because red dwarfs are much more volatile than stable stars like our Sun.
Every time a planet passes between us and its star - when it transits - the starlight gets filtered by the planet's atmosphere.
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