Chemistry reveals if a star has eaten its own planets

摘要

ASTRONOMERS could boost the efficiency of the search for alien worlds that might harbour life by using a technique that can help us rule out stars that have already eaten their own planets. Lorenzo Spina at the Astronomical Observatory of Padua, Italy, and his colleagues analysed a series of binary stars - pairs of stars that orbit one another. Because both stars in a binary pair are typically formed from a single giant molecular cloud, they should be chemically identical.