However, key components still need to be found to determine its habitability for life, including an atmosphere and its composition and if liquid water can exist on its surface.

[2] The only physical property directly derivable from the observations (besides the orbit) is the size of the planet relative to the central star, which follows from the amount of occultation of stellar light during a transit.

A very wide range of possible masses can be calculated by combining the radius with densities derived from the possible types of matter from which planets can be made.

The planet's primordial atmosphere would have been subjected to elevated photoevaporation during that period, which would probably have largely removed any H/He-rich envelope through hydrodynamic mass loss.

[16] Kepler-186f receives about 32%, placing it within the conservative zone but near the outer edge, similar to the position of Mars in the Solar System.

[5][18] A simple climate model – in which the planet's inventory of volatiles is restricted to nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water, and clouds are not accounted for – suggests that the planet's surface temperature would be above 273 K (0 °C; 32 °F) if at least 0.5 to 5 bars of CO2 is present in its atmosphere, for assumed N2 partial pressures ranging from 10 bar to zero, respectively.

Because of the very slow evolution of red dwarfs, the age of the Kepler-186 system was poorly constrained, although it is likely to be greater than a few billion years.

[23][24] As part of the SETI Institute's search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the Allen Telescope Array had listened for radio emissions from the Kepler-186 system for about a month as of 17 April 2014.

No signals attributable to extraterrestrial technology were found in that interval; however, to be detectable, such transmissions, if radiated in all directions equally and thus not preferentially towards the Earth, would need to be at least 10 times as strong as those from Arecibo Observatory.

[8] Another search, undertaken at the crowdsourcing project SETI-Live, reports inconclusive but optimistic-looking signs in the radio noise from the Allen Array observations.

[21] Additionally the Square Kilometer Array would significantly improve radio observations over the Arecibo Observatory and Green Bank Telescope.

A study of atmospheric evolution in Earth-size planets in habitable zones of G-Stars (a class containing the Sun, but not Kepler-186) suggested that 0.8–1.15 R🜨 is the size range for planets small enough to lose their initial accreted hydrogen envelope but large enough to retain an outgassed secondary atmosphere such as Earth's.