[4] It is small (less than 0.8 solar masses),[5] deficient in carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and completely devoid of lithium.

It has been suggested, both for theoretical and observational reasons, that the formation of low-mass stars in the interstellar medium requires a critical metallicity somewhere between 1.5×10−8 and 1.5×10−6.

[6] According to Schneider et al., cooling by dust rather than the fine structure lines of CII and OI may have enabled the creation of such low-mass, metal-poor stars in the early universe.

[2] The star was described by Elisabetta Caffau et al. in an article published by the journal Nature in September 2011.

[4] As of 2011[update] Caffau and her team expect to find between five and fifty similar stars with the telescope in the future.