New York, Oct 13 (PTI) Scientists have discovered Sun-like twin stars, one of which may have ingested a dozen ormore of its own rocky planets, located 350 light years fromEarth.
The planet-devouring star was named star after TitanKronos - a mythological character that devoured his children,including Poseidon (better known as the planet Neptune), Hades(Pluto) and three daughters.
The twin star was named after Kronos' lesser-knownbrother Krios. Their official designations are HD 240430 andHD 240429.
Researchers from Princeton University in the US confirmedthat the widely separated pair about 350 light years fromEarth are in fact a binary pair.
They also observed Kronos' strikingly unusual chemicalabundance pattern.
Other co-moving star pairs have had differentchemistries, but none as dramatic as Kronos and Krios, saidSemyeong Oh, a graduate student at Princeton.
"Most stars that are as metal-rich as Kronos have all theother elements enhanced at a similar level, whereas Kronos hasvolatile elements suppressed, which makes it really weird inthe general context of stellar abundance patterns," she said.
In other words, Kronos had an unusually high level ofrock-forming minerals, including magnesium, aluminum, silicon,iron, chromium and yttrium, without an equally high level ofvolatile compounds - those that are most often found in gasform, like oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and potassium.
Kronos and Krios are far enough apart that someastronomers have questioned whether the two were in fact abinary pair.
Both are about four billion years old, and like our own,slightly older sun, both are yellow G-type stars. They orbiteach other infrequently, on the order of every 10,000 years orso.
Binary stars should have matching radial velocities.
Finding matching velocities in the new study supported thetheory that Kronos and Krios, though two light years apart,were a binary set.
Then the researchers noticed the extreme chemicaldifferences between them. PTI MHN SARMHN.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.