At least one in a dozen stars shows evidence of planetary ingestion.

Stellar chemical compositions can be altered by ingestion of planetary material ^1,2 and/or planet formation, which removes refractory material from the protostellar disk ^3,4 . These 'planet signatures' appear as correlations between elemental abundance differences and the dust condensation temperature ^3,5,6 . Detecting these planet signatures, however, is challenging owing to unknown occurrence rates, small amplitudes and heterogeneous star samples with large differences in stellar ages ^7,8 . Therefore, stars born together (that is, co-natal) with identical compositions can facilitate the detection of planet signatures. Although previous spectroscopic studies have been limited to a small number of binary stars ^9-13 , the Gaia satellite ¹⁴ provides opportunities for detecting stellar chemical signatures of planets among co-moving pairs of stars confirmed to be co-natal ^15,16 . Here we report high-precision chemical abundances for a homogeneous sample of ninety-one co-natal pairs of stars with a well defined selection function and identify at least seven instances of planetary ingestion, corresponding to an occurrence rate of eight per cent. An independent Bayesian indicator is deployed, which can effectively disentangle the planet signatures from other factors, such as random abundance variation and atomic diffusion ¹⁷ . Our study provides evidence of planet signatures and facilitates a deeper understanding of the star-planet-chemistry connection by providing observational constraints on the mechanisms of planet engulfment, formation and evolution.
(© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)