Still, HR 4796 has three advantages over the competition -- proximity, youth and beauty. Not only is it a hop and a skip away in galactic terms (1,320 trillion miles), the dust disk is a sprightly 10 million years old -- a twentieth of Beta Pictoris age, far better for studying the birth of planets. Wed assumed for a long time that this is how planets form, but we had no evidence of any kind for it, says TIME Science writer Michael Lemonick. The evidence has been trickling in for the past few years, and this is another small piece of that puzzle. Until you actually detect the planets directly, its not proof, but this does advance the theory.
All in all, its great publicity for NASAs proposed orbiting Planet Finder, set for launch in the next century. Within most of our lifetimes, were going to have an answer to the question: Are there other Earths out there? said NASA stargazer Ed Weiler. Whether there is life out there is still debatable.