At least one in a dozen stars shows evidence of planetary ingestion

Stellar chemical compositions can be altered by ingestion of planetary material^(1,2) and/or planet formation, which removes refractory material from the protostellar disk^(3,4). These ‘planet signatures’ appear as correlations between elemental abundance differences and the dust condensation temperature^(3,5,6). Detecting these planet signatures, however, is challenging owing to unknown occurrence rates, small amplitudes and heterogeneous star samples with large differences in …