A series of 'planet eaters' appear throughout the universe

We may be looking at many "assassins" that have devoured planets right in Earth's sky .

The Australian - US - Irish research team led by Dr. Fan Liu from Monash University (Australia) examined 91 pairs of twin stars and identified many scary "planetary eaters" .

A planet is being "eaten" by a star - (Graphic photo: PHYS)

These star pairs are collected in detail by four state-of-the-art tools: the Sky Mapping Satellite - Gaia Telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA), the Observatory's Very Large Telescope European Southern Telescope (ESO), Magellan Telescope (Chile) and Keck Telescope (Hawaii - USA)

According to the article published in the scientific journal Nature, they discovered that 8% - equivalent to 1/12 - of the stars in these 91 pairs have swallowed a few planets in their lifetime!

This is demonstrated by the compositional difference between the predator star and its companion.

The twin stars should have been completely identical in chemical composition, which could be revealed through spectroscopic data. When a star no longer resembles its twin, it must have been associated with something significant.

And swallowing a planet is pretty much the only way to make that noticeable difference.

"The finding implies that stable planetary systems like our Solar System are not the norm. This gives us a deeper perspective on our place in the universe" - Dr. Yuan- Sen Ting from the Australian National University in Canberra, co-author, told Space.com.

A star eating a planet is not unusual, but it was previously thought that it only happened when the star was dying, exploding into a red giant.

About 5-6 billion years from now, our Sun will run out of energy and become a red giant star, expected to swallow the three closest planets: Mercury, Venus and Earth.

However, the stars in the 91 pairs of twins mentioned above are stars in their prime and youthful age. That is, they developed predatory behavior when they were still young or "middle-aged".

Cannibalized planets can have different origins, but the most likely possibility is that they are not the "children" of the star itself, but are wandering planets that were ejected from another star system, then accidentally passed by. and was devoured.

It's also possible that these planets swallow incomplete protoplanets early in their lives, rather than already formed planets.

But no matter the scenario, they are still ominous predators.