If you are in Robotics this semester, we briefly discussed this on Friday…

New Clues Discovered to Detect Alien Worlds (A Weekend Feature): “The key is lithium.  A stellar spectography survey of over five hundred stars reveals that known-planet-bearers, including our own Sun, have less than a hundredth of the lithium of ‘barren’ stars.  Stars don’t produce much lithium in their fusion reactions, so most share the same proportion of the element, which was created at the beginning of the universe.  But some stars seem to destroy their stock, fusing it into other elements, and a European team have found that they all have one thing in common: planets.”

I love lithium.