It isn't new ;)
IIRC when the project is estimated to be six months away from the finish date, it automatically starts to display it in the Research page.

It is about 6 months.
MCM also had the finish date displayed there. November 2015 IIRC:

Down to 17% complete on the research page. And no May 2016 ECD.

I was shooting for 20 year badge by end of April to ensure that I didn't get to 19 years 364 days and run out of work (I was similarly stuck just shy of Emerald when the work dried up in the project hiatus) with an option to break off at 10 years if it became clear I wouldn't make it. On my current trajectory I was going to miss it by a couple of weeks and be reliant on a project end date in the second half of May. With it being only about 30% complete I could shoot for 50 years, since that would push out the completion date over 2 years from now!

You see as much as 3 posts up enels already did ;?. Explaining why the research pages show what the research pages show is a waste of time... go to the Help FAQ... To me it's a fluid number where date extrapolation is made which is flex-periodically updated... [secret] end date estimate, minus start date, then passed time since expressed in a percent. But, can make many other interpretations of it, so I largely ignore and only use it as in input point to the alchemist way set in my computer [which then ignores anyone else's way ]