The star, about 1,320 trillion miles from Earth in the constellation Centaurus, is surrounded by a vast disk of dust in which baby planets may already have formed.
"This may be what our solar system looked like at the end of its main planetary formation phase," Michael Werner of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a NASA statement. "Comets may be forming right now in the disk's outer portion from remaining debris."
One sign that planets may be coalescing out of the dust is a hole in the disk close to the star. The dust that had been in this area may already have been swept into major planets, astronomers said.
Known as HR 4796, the star is not the first candidate for possible Earth-like planetary satellites, but it is one of the closest and also represents a crucial period in planetary evolution.
"With HR 4796, we're seeing pictures of a young adult star starting its own family of planets," said David Koerner, also of JPL, and one of the disk's discoverers. "This is the link between disks around very young stars and disks around mature stars, many with planets already orbiting them."
This star may be a youthful cousin of Beta Pictoris, which is also a good prospect for a solar system like our own. But Beta Pictoris, whose surrounding dust disk was discovered in 1983, is about 200 million years old, while HR 4796 is about 10 million, a prime planet-making age.
If this star is forming a planetary system of its own, it is probably much more far-flung than the one that contains Earth, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration statement said. The disk is about three times the size of Pluto's orbit around the Sun.
The planetary disk was spotted by the Keck II telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, March 16 by astronomers based at JPL and Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
The dust disk was discovered at the same time by another team at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile. This team included scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and the University of Florida at Gainesville.
Nature magazine Tuesday published related observations by astronomers from the Joint Astronomy Center (JAC) in Hawaii and at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA.
These scientists said their observations of three of the most well-known stars in the Milky Way -- Vega, Fomalhaut and Beta Pictoris -- suggested that planets in our galaxy may be more common than previously believed.
"One of the most striking features we see is a central hole in the disk around Fomalhaut," said Wayne Holland, who led the JAC team.
"The lack of bright emission close to the star suggests that dust is largely cleared out, and a probable explanation is that it has formed into rocky planets like the Earth, even though we cannot detect these directly."
Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy said of the findings: "It is generally believed that our own solar system formed out of such a disk. But whether the newly discovered disks contain majestic planets like Jupiter and Saturn or just comets and asteroids remains to be seen."
The images were obtained using the 15-meter (49-foot) James Clerk Maxwell telescope at the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii. The astronomers used a revolutionary new camera called SCUBA (Submillimeter Common User Bolometer Array).
"SCUBA uses detectors cooled to a tenth of a degree above absolute zero (minus 273 degrees C) to measure the tiny amounts of heat emission from small dust particles at a wavelength of close to one millimeter," said Holland.
His colleague Jane Greaves said these star systems may teach us more about the history of the solar system.
"What we see is almost exactly what astronomers orbiting nearby stars would have seen if they had pointed a millimeter-wavelength telescope at our own sun a few billion years ago."