How rare is our Solar System?
However, many of them are quite different from the Solar System we know.
But many planetary systems orbiting around other stars have suffered from a very chaotic past.
The relatively calm history of our Solar System has favored the flourishing of life here on Earth.
Our international team of astronomers has tackled this issue inresearch published in Nature Astronomy.
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Instead, we analyzed the chemical composition of stars in binary systems.
Binary systems are made up of two stars in orbit around one another.
From this, we established how many stars contained more planetary material than their companion star.
[2108.12040] Lorenzo Spina, Parth Sharma, Jorge Melendez et al.
Lithium is quickly destroyed in stars, while it is conserved in planets.
Third, the stars containing more iron than their companion also contain more than similar stars in the Galaxy.
Therefore these stars have been chemically enriched by rocks, from planets or planetary material.
The hunt for Earth 2.0
These results represent a breakthrough for stellar astrophysics and exoplanet exploration.
There are millions of relatively nearby stars similar to the Sun.
