The eater of planets. Get acquainted — Kronos!

In 2017 astronomers were astonished by one discovery — a binary star system which they named Krios and Kronos. The stars were so different in chemical elements that at first scientists could not be sure that those stars really belonged to one system.

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Kronos (HD 240430) is a star resembling a lot our Sun, but it is located over 350 light-years from us. The main curious thing about Kronos is that it is a very disastrous star. While our Sun behaves friendly with the Earth, giving it warmth and other positive effect, Kronos on the contrary swallows the planets orbiting it.

Specialist say that the star already has eaten 15 rocky planets over 4 billion year of existence. By the way, its partner star Krios (HD240429) does not do that.

It is not a coincidence that the star was named like Kronos. According to Greek mythology, Kronos was a titan who consumed his children.

The scientists were interested in chemical elements of the stars and started to study them in details. They were surprised to find that while the two stars had the same quantity of volatile element which are usually in gas forms, Kronos was characterized by a great deal of rocky minerals, like aluminium, iron, magnesium, chromium and silicon.

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The hypothesis about gobbling planet was born because of dominating amount of cliffy components. Astronomer Oh was supposing that perhaps the two stars formed in various time or were not always a part of one system. After the scientist checked the assumption on condensation temperature, i.e. temperature when volatile elements (as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen) become solids, she was aware that Kronos did not have any element that turned solid under 1 700 Fahrenheit. Moreover, it has a great deal of components that become solids at higher degrees.

Of course, the precise process of how Kronor devoured its planets is unknown, but the team of Oh introduces a few theories.
One of the most acceptable is the following. Both stars, Kronos and Krios, once approached each other very closely that distorted the orbits of other planets, which bumped into Kronos with time. But because Krios is different in components that would mean that it did not have the same fate, so the question arises: how is it possible? The explanation might be in the fact that the stars meet each other only once per 10 000 years, so that is probable that Krios was far away while Kronos ate the planets.

Still there are a lot of questions. The scientists decided not to stop in their investigations and they plan collect more information about such kind of evolution with the help of space ships which will probe other planets and stars.

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Sources: 1, 2, 3.