From Mashable · Elisha Sauers · · 1m 20s
Did the sun swallow our missing super-Earth?
A Turkish astronomer thinks the sun ate the planet our solar system should have had, and left the evidence inside itself.
In brief
A Turkish astronomer thinks the sun ate the planet our solar system should have had, and left the evidence inside itself. The sun's strange lack of lithium is the fingerprint of a rocky planet it may have swallowed billions of years ago. Originally reported by Mashable.
The planet we never got
Super-Earths are everywhere in the galaxy, yet our solar system has none. Astronomers have been stuck on why for years.
Maybe the sun ate it
Mutlu Yildiz of Ege University ran simulations of the young sun, one version fed a planet and one not, to see which matches the star we see today.
A dense, metal-rich world
The models that lined up with real measurements involved a rocky planet five to 10 times Earth's mass, loaded with heavy elements like Mercury.
Follow the missing lithium
The sun's surface holds over 100 times less lithium than its birth materials suggest it should. Lithium only breaks down deep inside a star, so something dragged it down.
“Today, the sun's surface has over 100 times less lithium than expected.”
Enter Dev Dilek
Yildiz named the hypothetical planet Dev Dilek, Turkish for "Great Wish." Its lithium-poor, metal-rich debris would explain both the shortage and the sun's interior readings.
“"We believe it could," Yildiz said in a statement.”
It survived the fall
Separate calculations show an iron-rich world shrinks under pressure as it plunges, burning off slowly. Most of its core would reach exactly the depth the models need.
The bottom line
The sun's strange lack of lithium is the fingerprint of a rocky planet it may have swallowed billions of years ago.
