Saw this on BBC's website this morning. Apparently, 20% - 60% of stars similar to the Sun in the Milky Way have discs of dust around them, which as we know, could mean the material needed for rocky planets to form.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7249884.stm
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This is very interesting. To add my own perspective, what this means for sure is that the rocky material around these stars has grown to bodies of at least km size - i.e. things like asteroids or comets in the Solar System. It's less clear that rocky planets have formed - in fact the presence of lots of dust tends to suggest that collisions are grinding things down rather than building bigger bodies. This happens in the asteroid belt today though, because of the influence of Jupiter. So it's a reasonable inference that planet formation seems to be common.
The disks they're talking about in the article aren't imaged directly, but they're probably similar to the nearer examples where we can resolve the disk. A nice example is AU Mic, where there's a beautiful HST image.
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