Study Says Sun May Bear 5-10 Earth-Mass Planet Fingerprints

3 articles · Updated · The Royal Astronomical Society · Sep 10

A new Monthly Notices study says the Sun’s interior may still carry detectable traces of a super-Earth it engulfed early in its history, pointing to a planet about 5-10 times Earth’s mass.
MESA-based modeling found that swallowing such a planet could simultaneously improve matches to helioseismic measurements and explain the Sun’s unusually low surface lithium—two long-standing problems for standard solar models.
The researchers also found the planet could pass through the Sun’s outer layers while losing little mass, leaving a deep chemical imprint that might remain observable billions of years later.
If future helioseismic or other observations identify the predicted structural and chemical signature, it would strengthen the idea that the young Sun consumed an inward-migrating super-Earth once theorized to have formed inside Mercury’s orbit.