For reasons not yet fully understood, technetium lives in the atmospheres of a select subset of red stars. This alone would not be cause for alarm except that long-lived technetium has a half-life of just a few million years, which is much, much shorter than the age and life expectancy of the stars in which it is found. In other words, the star cannot have been born with the stuff, for if it were, there would be none left by now. There is also no known mechanism to create technetium in a star’s core and have it dredge itself up to the surface where it is observed, which has led to exotic
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