Co-moving pair of stars abundances

These 'planet signatures' appear as correlations between elemental abundance differences and the dust condensation temperature. Detecting these planet signatures, however, is challenging owing to unknown occurrence rates, small amplitudes and heterogeneous star samples with large differences in stellar ages.

Therefore, stars born together (that is, co-natal) with identical compositions can facilitate the detection of planet signatures. Although previous spectroscopic studies have been limited to a small number of binary stars, the Gaia satellite provides opportunities for detecting stellar chemical signatures of planets among co-moving pairs of stars confirmed to be co-natal. Here we report high-precision chemical abundances for a homogeneous sample of ninety-one co-natal pairs of stars with a well defined selection function and identify at least seven instances of planetary ingestion, corresponding to an occurrence rate of eight per cent.