A new analysis of at least 91 pairs of twin stars found that these planetary bodies, which have comparable diameters and chemical compositions, have shown signs of consuming a planet.
According to the scientists, Reuters said, the event may have occurred when the planet was thrown out of a balanced orbit for a variety of causes.
Earth and its brother planets, as part of the planetary system circling around the sun, have been stable for around 4.5 billion years. But this latest study demonstrates that other planetary systems are not so fortunate.
The study looked at pairs of stars that formed within the same interstellar cloud of gas and dust — so-called co-natal stars — and had about comparable chemical makeup, mass, and age. These are the “twins.” While the pairings move in the same direction inside our Milky Way galaxy, they are not binary systems consisting of two stars gravitationally bound together.
When a star engulfs a planet, its chemical composition alters because it incorporates the elements found in the unfortunate world. The researchers sought out stars that differed from their twins because they had more telltale elements such as iron, nickel, or titanium, which indicate the remnants of a rocky planet, in comparison to certain other elements.”It’s the elemental abundance differences between two stars in a co-natal system,” said astronomer Fan Liu of Monash University in Australia, who led the study published in Nature.
