Study suggests sun may carry 'fingerprints' of engulfed super-Earth

Billions of years after the fact, the sun may still carry within it the memory of a world it consumed. A new study proposes that the young sun swallowed a super-Earth five to ten times the mass of our own planet, and that this ancient act of stellar appetite left chemical and structural fingerprints still legible today — fingerprints that could simultaneously explain two of solar physics' most stubborn mysteries. It is a reminder that the history of a star, like the history of a civilization, is written not only in what it has created, but in what it has absorbed and lost.