A Chondritic Solar Neighborhood

Understand

A persistent question in exoplanet demographics is whether exoplanetary systems form from similar compositional building blocks to our own.

• Polluted white dwarf stars offer a unique way to address this question as they provide measurements of the bulk compositions of exoplanetary material.
• We present a statistical analysis of the rocks polluting oxygen-bearing white dwarfs and compare their compositions to rocks in the Solar System.
• We find that the majority of the extrasolar rocks are consistent with the composition of typical chondrites.