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Chemical Fingerprint Found for Planet Hunting
from Science News
Astronomers have identified an easy-to-measure chemical fingerprint for determining which sunlike stars are likely to host planets. The marker--a low abundance of lithium in the atmosphere of these stars--could prove an invaluable guide for planet hunters trying to determine which of the myriad sunlike stars to select for long-term study.
In their study, Garik Israelian of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain, and his colleagues relied on data from a census of 133 sunlike stars, most of them monitored for several years with the European Southern Observatory's HARPS spectrograph at the La Silla observatory in Chile. Tiny wobbles in the motions of 30 of these stars indicate the gravitational tug of unseen planets.
In the Nov. 12 Nature, Israelian and his colleagues report that the majority of sunlike stars hosting planets in the HARPS sample have, on average, one-tenth the amount of lithium of those without planets. It's been known for decades that Earth's sun shows such a depletion.
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