I can't tell what if anything is wrong with the logic that leads him to infer what he does from the "strange xenon" type evidence. But nowhere does the article address the broader evidence picture, which I think strongly weighs against his idea. I seem to recall our sun is thought to be a garden-variety main-sequence star. I'm left to wonder how Dr. Manuel explains that.
We've known the mass of the earth since before 1800, when Cavendish measured the strength of the gravitational force. From the mass of the earth, its orbit around the sun, and Newton's Law of Gravitation, we know the mass of the sun. If you somehow make the sun more massive, then it takes more velocity for the earth to maintain a stable orbit at its current distance.
Which only brings me back to the point that I'd expect someone to have noticed by now if the sun had more iron and more density than we think. Are we going too fast for the current model of the sun's composition but nobody's noticed?