It’s not unheard of to find a surviving star at the scene of a titanic supernova explosion, which would be expected to obliterate everything around it, but new research has provided a long-awaited clue to a specific type of stellar death. In some supernova cases, astronomers find no trace of the former star’s outermost layer of hydrogen. What happened to the hydrogen? Suspicions that companion stars are responsible — siphoning away their partners’ outer shell before their death — are supported by the recent identification of a surviving companion star on the scene of supernova 2013ge.