alt Hacker News'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
Comments
I find it endlessly fascinating that information cannot be destroyed and we keep finding more and more ways to read the universe at every scale!
> Their results favour a scenario in which the young Sun engulfed a super-Earth around 5–10 times the mass of Earth
Given the state of the early solar system, it would be surprising if the Sun didn't swallow a lot of metallic and carbonaceous rocks and pebbles. But it seems unclear to me how the researchers would distinguish between one super-Earth and >10^10 smaller rocks? Chemically I feel the two would be largely the same.
Has someone got a quick explainer for why adding a planet would result in less lithium? Is it just that a super-earth would be big enough and have so little lithium that it would measurably water down the other elements?
Nominative determinism- first author's name "Mutlu Yıldız" means "happy star"
You have to get nearly halfway from the surface of the sun (photospere) to its core before the density of the sun’s material is equivalent to that of the earth.
That’s it Apollo! Spit it out, what’s in your mouth, spit it out now!
and how exactly are we going to put our fingers into the sun?
That sentence is kind of scary.
Imagine being a civilization on a planet that knows it's going to be swallowed by their sun.. (during the lifetime of the living members)
Did stellar abundance fits in grad school, getting the Teff systematics out took months.
When I saw the word 'Fingerprints', I thought it was a brilliant expression.
I once ate a peanut too.
MESA, a piece of software referenced in this article, is a pretty incredible system. (Even referring to it as software underplays the extent of its community and impact.)
Many people are involved in MESA and Bill Paxton was always quick to point out the many new folks that worked on it, but this article does a great job of celebrating his impact:
https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/news/an-accidental-astrophysicist
It's amazing to me that he went from being the voice on the other end of the Mother Of All Demos to having such a major impact on stellar astrophysics during his "retirement." He passed away in 2025.