Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton (AAAP) Monthly Meeting

What happens to planets when their stars begin to die? For many of the planets we’ve discovered outside our Solar System, the answer is a trip into the fiery depths of their host star, particularly when that star becomes a red giant. What happens when a bloated star devours a Jupiter is quite different from what happens to a star that devours a Mercury! This engulfment should leave behind some easy-to-identify clues, but only if we know enough about the dying star. In this talk, Dr. Carlberg will share her investigations into what we know (or think we know) about the physical changes a star undergoes during its lifetime and how we can use this knowledge to search for evidence of planetary engulfment. One of her research goals is to disentangle the several processes that affect a red giant’s lithium abundance to identify stars for which “lithium enriched” translates into “ate a planet.”