STARS rich in metals are more likely to host planets than your average star. This discovery will help astronomers refine how they search for planets, and is already providing fresh clues to how planets form.
In a survey of 754 nearby stars, those with roughly the same amount of iron and other metals as the sun have an 8 per cent chance of hosting planets. “Once we see stars with three times the metal content of our sun, the planet detection rate goes up to 20 per cent,” says Debra Fischer, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who…
