Fun with Lithium

That's pretty cool. So we'll be able to determine if a star had planets in its orbit just by its lithium levels - I wonder why that is though.

efkelley said:

It explains that in the article. Our sun has a low lithium content because the lithium is in the planets.

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It doesn't say that. It says the planets create more convection currents within the sun that move the Lithium towards the hotter core.

Xelebes said:

It doesn't say that. It says the planets create more convection currents within the sun that move the Lithium towards the hotter core.

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It says that, but also that this is the current idea, and it still hasn't been tested. The low levels of lithium has been confirmed, but this part is still an idea.

This is fantab. I'm writing an extra-solar colony novel.

There are a number of stars that are considered very very similar to our Sun (and thus may favor planet, life, and be better targets for SETI investigation)

The best possibility is 200 light years away, and one reason the science-daddies like it is: low lithium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIP_56948

I'd read about the lithium but really didn't understand why lithium mattered so much until the above. thanks.

It's named "Intipa Awachan" in Draco.

No, seriously, that's not the alien name ... ... it's in our constellation of Draco, and they gave it an Inca name that means "Sun's twin" in their mythology.

"Intipa Awachan"

I gotta say, for something that's supposedly science fact, the article used the phrase "burned up" to hypothesize what happened to the lithium. Burn? Like combustion? A star is a big ball of dense plasma! What they really mean is "transmute" or "fuse" or something in the nuclear realm, not the chemical.

Freaking irritating, from a website that should know better.