The whole of the hydrogen on the earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.
From a chemist's point of view, the surface or interior of a star…is boring—there are no molecules there.
What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.
We are 'nuclear waste' from the fuel that makes stars shine; indeed, each of us contains atoms whose provenance can be traced back to thousands of different stars spread through our Milky Way.
55 Cancri is extraordinarily rich in heavy elements and extraordinarily efficient at making planets - much more so than our sun - and those elements are the very ones you need to make planets that aren't just gas giants.
It is sound judgment to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.
It can be very hard to know the history of a particular star, but once in a while, we get lucky and find stars with chemical compositions that likely came from in-falling planets.
We now know that stars which are abundant in heavy metals are five times more likely to harbor orbiting planets than are stars deficient in metals.
