Some stars swallow their own planets, according to a team of Spanish and Swiss researchers.
Using a highly sensitive spectrograph, they found incriminating evidence for such cannibalism in the light emitted by HD82943, a dwarf star in the constellation Hydra. Their findings are published in today's issue of Nature. Although 6Li is common in planets, it burns up quickly in stars after they are born and thus shouldn't exist in a star like HD82943. The fact that the star still has 6Li left to burn suggests that it engulfed one of its planets sometime within the past 30 million years. To confirm their theory, the scientists looked at another star that shared HD82943's characteristics except that it did not have planets.