Since Omega Centauri is thought to be Kapteyn's star place of origin, scientists estimate that its planets must be approximately 11.5 to 12 billion years old, thus making Kapteyn b not only the oldest known
possibly habitable exoplanet to date, but, along with Kapteyn c, the first that might have originated from another galaxy, outside of the Milky Way.
The articles in the pilot study focused on the 1996 discovery of
possibly fossilized extraterrestrial Martian microbes; the 2015 discovery of periodic dimming around Tabby's Star, thought to indicate the presence of an artificially constructed «Dyson sphere;» and the 2017 discovery of Earth - like
exoplanets in the
habitable zone of a star.