Astronomers expect that stars like our Sun will ultimately blow off much of their atmospheres into space near the ends of their lives. But new observations with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) of a huge star cluster in the constellation Pavo have shown - against all expectations - that a majority of the stars studied simply did not get to this final stage in their lives at all. This has created a major headache for current stellar theories. It seems that the amount of sodium in the stars is a very strong predictor of how they end their lives.