![NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly decayed over time. This illustration depicts the sequence of events that took place over millions of years, based on observations from Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRSpec (NIR-Infrared Spectrograph). -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/A-Bayesian-Search.png?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1)
[astro-ph.EP] We present a systematic Bayesian search for chemical fingerprints of planet engulfment in 113 solar twins and analogs with high-precision abundance measurements, 45 of which host known or candidate planets or brown-dwarf companions.
We constructed a Bayesian framework with three sets of abundance models: random scatter, Galactic chemical evolution, and planet engulfment with bulk Earth or CM chondrite compositions.
Through model comparisons, we identified three candidates whose abundance patterns strongly favor planet engulfment over the alternatives, with inferred engulfed masses of about 7.5-33 Earth masses. Our findings correspond to a nominal detection rate of 1-3% for planet-engulfment signatures among solar analogs.
This work extends abundance-based engulfment searches beyond the binary-star context and provides a framework for probing star-planet co-evolution with solar analogs, which goes beyond the commonly used abundance-condensation-temperature correlation (Tc slope).
Zimo Cheng, Sharon Xuesong Wang, Fan Liu, Haiyang Wang, Qinghui Sun, Johannes Buchner, Mia Babatsikos, Huiling Chen, Jiayue Zhang, Yuan-Sen Ting, Zhen Guo, Aaron Dotter, Serat M. Saad, Javier Osses
Comments: 9 pages of main text, 15 pages of appendices and references, 9 figures, and 6 tables. Submitted to AAS Journals. Machine-readable tables available upon request. Comments welcome. See also Babatsikos et al. at arXiv:2607.01699
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.03504 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2607.03504v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.03504
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Submission history
From: Sharon Xuesong Wang
[v1] Fri, 3 Jul 2026 17:28:53 UTC (5,199 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03504
Astrobiology, exoplanet,
