Sun-like star may have swallowed an exoplanet with help from a mysterious companion: 'You are what you eat, right?'

Astronomers have a cosmic mystery on their hands, investigating a celestial crime scene to determine if a distant star has eaten a super-Earth exoplanet. The star may have had an accomplice — a failed star or "brown dwarf" companion — which may have steered the unfortunate planet toward its fiery doom. The team charged with investigating this mystery first discovered hints of the crime when they found the star, TOI-5882, located around 1,300 light-years away, is surprisingly rich in the element lithium. "You are what you eat, right?" team leader Brooke Kotten of the University of Michigan said in a statement . "We know that there's much more lithium in planetary material than there is in stars. So if a star eats a planet , it's going to take on a bunch of lithium." So-called engulfment events such as this one occur very rapidly, on a timescale of a few days to a couple of weeks, which means catching stellar beings in the act of enjoying a planetary meal is extremely rare. Thus, astronomers have to act as cosmic crime scene investigators to reconstruct these events with the evidence at hand. "That's what makes this field so exciting. You really are solving a mystery," Kotten said. "We can't just watch the crime happen, so we have to work with all the clues we're given to figure out whodunit." One of the aims of these investigations is to discover the ways in which a star can devour a planet. …