Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Shedding Light on the Sun's "Lithium Mystery"

Universe Today reports Shedding Light on the Sun's "Lithium Mystery" "For decades, astronomers have known our Sun contains a low amount of lithium, while other solar-like stars actually have more. But they didn't know why. By looking at stars similar to the Sun to study this anomaly, scientists have now discovered of a trend: the majority of stars hosting planets possess less than 1% of the amount of lithium shown by most of the other stars. ‘The explanation of this 60 year-long puzzle is for us rather simple,’ said Garik Israelian, lead author on a paper appearing in this week's edition of Nature. ‘The Sun lacks lithium because it has planets.’"

How strange, and they don't yet know why. But this does give them a better way too look for exoplanets.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

May I present for your entertainment, the astro-medical musings of our future president.

Our sun doesn't need any lithium since G_d has given it the companionship of planets. The planets have two poles so there is no bipolar disorder in the neighborhood.

That's why stars with planets don't have lithium.

Gov. S. Palin