Artist’s impression of an exoplanet in orbit around a binary star MasPix/Alamy
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…
