When You Wish Upon Hydrogen And Helium, With A Small Amount Of Lithium...

The most widely accepted theories on how stars come into existence, from the dawn of the Universe and on, may need to be rewritten, after the discovery of a 16 billion year old star.

Here's the current theory :

After cooling for a few hundred thousand years following the Big Bang, the matter in the universe condensed into atoms. This gas, almost exclusively made up of hydrogen and helium with a small amount of lithium, accumulated into stars.

As the stars created heavier elements like carbon and iron through fusion reactions, and then scattered these elements into the cosmos with supernovae explosions, the array of elements that gathered into new stars became more varied.

They don't seem quite so magical when you know how they're made.