Of all the jobs that telescopes do — learning about distant galaxies, taking pictures of beautiful nebulae, or learning about far-off stars — one of the most exciting for the public is looking for habitable worlds. It's not easy to find a world that could harbor life as the conditions have to be just right: not too hot or too cold, not too much radiation, made of rock rather than gas, having an atmosphere that is thick enough but doesn't create a crushing pressure, and so on. It's also difficult to study planets outside of our solar system (called exoplanets) because they are so small relative to bigger, brighter objects like stars.
That's even more of a problem when a dim planet is close to a bright star, because the light from the star blows out the small amount of reflected light given off by the planet. It's like trying to take a photo when there's a bright light in the background — the light blurs out the details of nearby objects. There are plans for future observatories to study exoplanets, like the Habitable Worlds Observatory which NASA wants to launch in the 2040s which will have a special instrument called a coronagraph which blocks out the light from stars to study nearby planets.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope , set for launch in 2027, will also have a coronagraph so it can study exoplanets. But scientists aren't waiting around for these new telescopes to search for habitable planets. They are already working on finding these worlds using existing to.