Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have found 150,000 stars with 4,706 planets casting a shadow, when they orbit past. The February 23, 2017, issue of Nature reported astronomer Michael Gillon at a Belgium university headed a team that used telescopes in Chile, Hawaii, South Africa, Morocco, Spain, and England to find the Trappist-1 solar system with a planet, Trappist-1e, that maintains a habitable temperature above freezing and below boiling as it orbits around its sun-like star.
Light from stars is scattered and absorbed differently, if orbiting planets have an atmosphere with a chemical composition. Atmospheric gases, such as methane, oxygen, or carbon dioxide, signal the possibility of water and life. The Hubble Space Telescope has been able to tell what atmospheric gases from two of the Trappist-1 planets don't have, but the spectroscopes the James Webb Space Telescope will carry when it launches, possibly in October, 2018, will be capable of more atmospheric analysis.
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