The Sun has been pretty good to us here on Earth over the last billion or so years. Sure we get the occasional solar storm and some deviations from ideal temperatures. But, by and large, we have a relatively supportive parent star. It’s nothing like those poor planets that orbit the star Kronos (HD 240430), located some 350 light-years away.
On September 15, a team of Princeton astronomers posted a
paper on the physics pre-print site arXiv.org that argues the star Kronos devoured over a dozen of its rocky inner planets during the course of its 4 billion year lifetime. However, its companion star, Krios (HD 240429), has managed to avoid feasting on its own solid worlds.
The lead author of the study, Semyeong Oh, explained in a
press release that Kronos — named after the mythological Greek Titan who ate his own children — is the most obvious and dramatic example yet of a Sun-like star consuming its own planets. And, “because [Kronos] has a stellar companion to compare it to, it makes the case a little stronger,” she said.
Initially, Oh and her team were not trying to find a planet-eating star and its thin twin. Instead, they were using new stellar data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft to simply identify co-moving stars that formed together from the same materials around the same time.