Like anything else, stars have life spans. They are born (from collapsing clouds of interstellar dust), they go through a long main phase where they fuse various elements in their cores, and eventually they die when they run out of fuel. The finer details of these steps are based on what the star is made of, how massive it is, and what sort of company it keeps. Stars like our Sun have lifespans in the 9-10 billion year range—of which ours is near the middle—but other stars can have much shorter or longer lifespans, and as astronomers look out into the galaxy they can find stars at all different phases of their lives…of course, the longer a phase lasts, the more likely it is to find stars existing within it. We’ve found stars that are only a few thousand years old and we know of regions where stars are, right now, in the process of being born, but what is the oldest star we know of?

Actually, it’s not all that far away, in cosmic terms. Just 190 light-years distant in our own galaxy, HD 140283 (aka the Methuselah star) is, as of 2013, the oldest star ever discovered. Based on its stage as a subgiant and its remarkably low amount of heavy elements, astronomers have estimated the age of this star as 14.3 billion years old. Now this number is actually more than the estimated age of the Universe itself, but don’t worry—there’s a reason for that.

Read the rest of this story by astronomer Phil Plait on Slate here: The Oldest Known Star in the Universe.