Astronomers have discovered Sun-like twin stars — dubbed HD 240430 and HD 240429 and named Kronos and Krios. These twin stars are known for eating up rocky planets.
READ: All about egg-shaped dwarf planet Haumea!
Here are all the interesting things you need to know:
1. The twin stars are located 350 light years from Earth and at a distance of 2 light years from each other. Around 15 Earth masses worth of rocky planets are speculated to have been eaten by the stars. Astronomers from the Princeton University have found that the widely separate stars are a binary system.
2. One of the stars is named after a mythological character or Titan named Kronos. The character is known for eating his children, including Poseidon (better known as the planet Neptune), Hades (Pluto) and his three daughters.
3. The stars are around 4 billion years old, and these yellow G-type stars orbit each other over a span of 10,000 years. The chemical composition of Kronos has been found to be very unusual when compared to the context of the Sun.
4. Kronos' surface comprises of heavier elements, which can make up minerals that are rock-forming, like magnesium, aluminum, silicon, iron, chromium, and yttrium. These materials are found in abundance in Kronos' outer layers.
"Most stars that are as metal-rich as Kronos have all the other elements enhanced at a similar level, whereas Kronos has volatile elements suppressed, which makes it really weird in the general context of stellar abundance patterns," said Semyeong Oh, a graduate student at Princeton, according to PTI.
5. Lighter elements like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and potassium are also found in Kronos' atmosphere in gaseous form. The heavier elements present on Kronos are said to have formed after the lighter ones as per the laws of chemistry.
"Even if our sun ate the entire inner solar system, it wouldn't come close to the anomaly we see in this star," David Hogg, the group leader for astronomical data at the Centre for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) at the Flatiron Institute, who co-authored a new study on the subject, said on Thursday.
6. Astronomers detected differences between the chemical compositions of Kronos and Krios. The reason behind the disparity in their chemical composition is said to prevail because of the rocky planet engulfment by Kronos.
"All of the elements that would make up a rocky planet are exactly the elements that are enhanced on Kronos, and the volatile elements are not enhanced, so that provides a strong argument for a planet engulfment scenario, instead of something else," Oh said.
7. The radial velocities of these two binary stars Kronos and Krios are believed to be matching, according to the researchers.
