Twin stars reveal new insight into planetary evolutionStudy finds 8% of twin stars have consumed planets. Credit: scitechdaily.com

A recent study published in the journal Nature suggests that at least one in every twelve stars has consumed planets or planetary material. This finding comes from an international research team that examined twin stars with identical composition. However, they found that approximately eight percent of the twin stars had significant differences, puzzling astronomers.

Led by researchers from ASTRO 3D, the team utilized data collected from three powerful telescopes – the Magellan Telescope and the Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, USA. The precision of their analysis allowed them to detect chemical differences in the twin stars, providing strong evidence that one of the stars had swallowed planets or planetary material, altering its composition.

Out of the 91 pairs of twin stars observed, around eight percent showed signs of planetary ingestion. What makes this study unique is that these twin stars were in their prime, rather than in their final phases of life like red giants. This challenges the previous belief that such events were not possible, as stars in their late stages of life were thought to be the only ones capable of engulfing planets.

According to Dr. Fan Liu, lead author of the paper and a researcher at ASTRO 3D, the process of ingestion is complex, and it is possible that the stars have consumed whole planets or material from protoplanetary disks. This discovery has significant implications for the study of the long-term evolution of planetary systems.

Co-author and ASTRO 3D researcher, Associate Professor Yuan-Sen Ting from the Australian National University (ANU), says that the findings open up new opportunities for planet evolution theorists to explore. The study is part of a larger initiative called the Complete Census of Co-moving Pairs of Objects (C3PO), which aims to observe a complete sample of bright co-moving stars identified by the Gaia astrometric satellite.

Professor Emma Ryan-Weber, Director of ASTRO 3D, explains that this study aligns with the research theme of Chemical Evolution of the Universe. The findings shed light on the distribution of chemical elements and their journey, which includes being consumed by stars. It is important to note that the twin stars studied were not necessarily binary stars, but they were all born from the same molecular clouds and traveled together.

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