Earthly Hors d'oeuvres For Hungry Red Dwarfs

This illustration shows the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 and two of its rocky planets. Researchers detected several red dwarfs just like it that have appeared to have eaten their planets, though TRAPPIST-1 isn't one of them. Planetary engulfment is a rare yet possible outcome of normal planetary system evolution. Image Credit: ESA/Hubble. Licence Type: Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

We know that stars can engulf planets because stars that swell up to become red giants overwhelm any close-in planets. The Sun will do this to Venus, Mercury, and possibly Earth in a few billion years. But research shows that it can happen when low-mass stars first enter the main sequence. Lithium gives it away.

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Researchers Match Up 12 Meteorites with the Near-Earth Asteroids They Came From

Every day meteoroids blast through our planet’s atmosphere to hit the ground as meteorites. A team of researchers in Italy traced twelve of them to progenitor asteroids that orbit in near-Earth space. Scientists treasure meteorites because they reveal information about their parent bodies. In an arXiv paper, two Italian researchers—Albino Carbognani and Marco Fenucci—analyze the characteristics of the parent bodies of 20 selected meteorites. They were able to track all but eight back to their parent asteroids. Based on their work, the pair says at least a quarter of meteorites come from collisions that happened in near-Earth space and not in the Main Belt. Meteorites from Near-Earth Asteroids: How They Got Here Many meteorites are chondritic, similar to asteroids in the Main Belt (or came from it). In their paper, the authors point out that progenitor meteoroids (including many that fall to Earth and become meteorites) formed millions of years ago following collisions between main-...

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SETI Researchers Double-Checked 1 Million Objects for Signs of Alien Signals

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