Scientists claim they have strong evidence that more than a quarter of all sun-like stars have a habit of eating up their own planets. But before you start worrying, you should know this could be helpful in hunting another Earth-like planet in the cosmos.
In recent years, astronomers have studied more binary star systems, where two sibling stars orbit each other. They have discovered these pairings are more different than expected. The two stars’ chemical makeups are different from each other particularly. This opposes the theoretical assumption that each star was formed from the same primordial stew and the duo should differ in the chemical sense.
Observing several Sun-like stars
An international team featuring scientists from four continents studied a sample of 107 binary pairs of sun-like stars. They discovered that 33 of the binaries were “chemically anomalous” with high levels of iron that don’t fit with the current understanding of how stars form and grow.
The two explanations for this stellar weirdness are that twin stars could be made of different stuff since birth, or that one of the stars eats up a planet or two over time. The team believes that their study hints towards the latter instance as more likely.
“The observations are consistent with a scenario in which stars are being polluted by Earth-like material accreted from their planetary systems,” reads a paper published In Nature Astronomy, led by Lorenzo Spina from the Italian National Observatory in Padova.
Will our Sun eat up Earth?
Before you think our Sun might gobble the Earth someday, Spina and the team said that this revelation is actually good news for planets in our solar system, which has been very stable. Our Sun shows little sign of eating up Mercury anytime soon. Not until it turns into a red supergiant and expands to gobble most of the inner solar system including our planet. But we might be another billion years from that.
“We now have a potential ‘upstream’ method to identify those Sun-like stars that are less likely to host Earth-like planets, which could be useful as a criterion for planet searches,” the paper reads.
