Stars That Swallowed Their Planets ✦
Astronomers studied the chemical composition of 113 stars similar to the Sun and found three whose atmospheres contain traces of engulfed Earth-like planets. The mass of each engulfed planet ranges from 7.5 to 33 Earth masses. Such events are rare: only 1–3% of stars bear such evidence.
Starlight is a star's chemical "recipe." By splitting it into a rainbow (spectroscopy), astronomers can see what the star is made of. Usually, it's just light gases, but if a lot of iron, nickel, and silicon suddenly show up, it means the star swallowed its planets. Astronomers briefly call these heavy elements metals.
After checking 113 twins of the Sun, scientists found three stars with a recent "planetary meal." One of them devoured matter equivalent to 33 Earths—as if it had dropped an entire Jupiter onto itself. Overall, 1–3% of Sun-like stars bear such a chemical scar. Previously, this method was only applied to pairs of stars, but now we can search for planetary "drownings" in solitary ones by carefully accounting for how a star ages (stellar evolution), how new elements are forged inside it (nucleosynthesis), how the Galaxy's chemistry changes (galactic evolution), and what raw material planets are born from (protoplanetary disk). This is how we read the fates of worlds around distant suns.
🎯 If the Sun swallowed Earth, the iron boost would be almost imperceptible—just 0.004%. Yet modern instruments can pick up even such a faint signal in the light of other stars.
🎬 In Stanisław Lem's novel Solaris, a sentient ocean consumes people, but on a cosmic scale, entire planets become prey to their suns, leaving behind only spectral traces—chemical memories of lost worlds.