i think you're misunderstanding slightly why this is important. it's not surprising for small stars to live a long time (they burn quite slowly). what's surpr

i think you're misunderstanding slightly why this is important. it's not surprising for small stars to live a long time (they burn quite slowly). what's surprising is that we don't see any older than about 14 billion years old. so that suggests that the universe is only that old. and really, to astronomers, that's not surprising either, since the universe is known to be that old from other measurements. what's actually surprising is that this star matches the universe's age so closely when it contains some elements other than hydrogen or helium. since that implies that it wasn't one of the first stars made (which would be pure hydrogen and helium), but a star made from remnants of other stars. so it is at least "second generation". so there must have been some stars of short lifetime before it. and it's actually tricky to fit that in, given how we think stars are created and how the universe evolved (the real problem is that the hydrogen starts out fairly evenly spread out and needs time to clump, under gravitation, to form the first stars - the density fluctuations that describe this are constrained by observations of the microwave background, which is quite smooth). [some more background to make this consistent: the universe "started" as hydrogen; large stars, which live a short time, can make other elements than helium from hydrogen; small stars, which live a long time, make only helium from hydrogen.]