Scientists found that the rocky exo-planet's density is affected by its host star Magnesium to iron content. Higher [Mg/Fe] content in the star → lower its planet density.
This holds when considering only F G K type (temperature near sun) stars.
They used high-resolution spectroscopy which measures how much light the star emits at specific wavelengths.
Elemental content (Fe, Mg, Si, Al, C, etc.) were obtained using spectral line fitting method. Each element absorbs light at specific wavelengths — the depth of these lines shows how much of that element is present.
They used a Bayesian regression method here.
To measure how strong the relation is between density and element ratio Pearson Correlation Coefficient was calculated.
Source: https://arxiv.org/html/2510.04981v1