Planet-eating stars can be identified by their telltale chemistry

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

Astronomers could boost the efficiency of the search for alien worlds that might harbour life by using a technique that can help determine whether a star has already eaten its 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 typically formed from a single giant molecular cloud, they should be chemically identical.

“However, we’ve known for …