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Oldest Known Star In the Universe Discovered
Zothecula writes "A team of astronomers at The Australian National University working on a five-year project to produce the first comprehensive digital survey of the southern sky has discovered the oldest known star in the Universe. The star dates back 13.7 billion years, only shortly after the Big Bang itself. It's also nearby (at least, from a cosmological perspective) — about 6,000 light-years away. The star is notable for the very small amount of iron it contains (abstract). The lead researcher, Stefan Keller, said, 'To make a star like our Sun, you take the basic ingredients of hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang and add an enormous amount of iron – the equivalent of about 1,000 times the Earth's mass. To make this ancient star, you need no more than an Australia-sized asteroid of iron and lots of carbon. It's a very different recipe that tells us a lot about the nature of the first stars and how they died.'"
Small stars can live a very long-time. For example a red dwarf that is a tenth the size of the sun can likely keep burning for trillions of years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf. A star of the size discussed here easily has billions of years more to it lifespan.
Larger apparent magnitude means dimmer because magnitude is on a log scale, similar to pH is a log scale with a negative sign. Brightness = 2.512^(-Magnitude)
Hot fusion has been replicated many times on the surface of the Earth in: Hydrogen bombs (uncontrolled), Tokamaks, Stellerators, Z-pinch machines, Farnsworth fusors (in peoples backyard shed) and other devices. We have not managed to extract more energy from it than we put in, but we certainly replicated it.