[astro123]

Small stars live a very long time. A star of the mass of our sun has a lifespan of ~10 billion years which gets you almost back to the beginning of the universe (~13 billion). This star is smaller (0.8 solar masses), so it can live even longer, so we don't need to look at distant objects to see early, low mass stars.

The other issue is that we just can't see individual stars at cosmological distances except in incredibly rare cases. See for example [1] where they discovered a single star at redshift 1 (roughly 6 billion years ago). Basically, if the star gets lensed in just the right way, it can be hugely magnified. This is a strong contender for the coolest observation that I know about. Galaxies are hard to see at redshift 1, to get a single star is crazy.

On your second question, generally people think that galaxies formed "inside-out". I.e. the inner region forms first, then the outer region. See [2]. Stars almost never collide with things (except maybe at the very center of the galaxy, but still super rare there), so survival isn't really a function of position in the galaxy.

That said, this observation is in stripe 82 (a very famous section of the SDSS. They observed it to greater depth than the rest of their area and many other surveys have since also observed it) which I'm pretty sure is away from the galactic plane (so not straight toward the center).

[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab2888 [2] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/pia17554....