The Chemical Compositions of Stars with Planets: A Review

Abstract

A number of trends among the properties of exoplanets have become evident in the years since the first one was announced in 1995. One particularly interesting trend began to emerge in 1997: the incidence of giant planets correlates with the metallicity of the host star. This has since been established with a high degree of statistical significance by several research groups. Other, more subtle trends are beginning to appear as the sample size continues to grow and the statistics improve. I review the state of our knowledge concerning the observed compositional trends and their possible causes and suggest several research directions.