Planet-eating stars can be identified by their telltale chemistry
Stars that have eaten their planets aren't promising places to look for alien life, and now there is a technique that can help quickly identify such stars from their chemistry
Artist’s content of an exoplanet successful orbit astir a binary star MasPix/Alamy
Astronomers could boost the ratio of the search for alien worlds that mightiness harbour beingness by utilizing a method that tin assistance find whether a prima has already eaten its planets.
Lorenzo Spina astatine the Astronomical Observatory of Padua, Italy, and his colleagues analysed a bid of binary stars – pairs of stars that orbit 1 another. Because some stars successful a binary brace typically formed from a azygous elephantine molecular cloud, they should beryllium chemically identical.
“However, we’ve known for …
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