The star that shouldn’t be.

ABC Science puzzles over a star that, according to everything we know about stars, simply shouldn’t exist:

The star, called SDSS102915+172927, is reported today in the journal Nature.

It has about 80 per cent the mass of the Sun and is composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, something previously thought impossible.

“Accepted theory predicts stars with low mass and extremely low quantities of metals, shouldn’t exist because the clouds of material from which they formed could never have condensed”, says [Dr Elisabetta Caffau from the Zentrum fur Astronomie der Universitat Heidelberg].