Methuselah's Star is not older than the Universe after all. But it's still pretty frakking old.

There are times in science when you get a result that you know is wrong, but you don't know why. This can lead to some interesting suppositions and many times to very interesting science.

Like, for example, when you find a star that appears to be, um, older than the Universe.

Such is HD 140283, a star similar to the Sun that lies 200 light years from Earth — pretty close as stars go. It's been known for some time to be a special kind of star, one we say is low metallicity.

In a nutshell, the ...