A speck of crystal that fell to Earth in a meteorite has been traced back to a red-giant star.
It’s not the same as having a sample return mission to, say, Aldebaran, but it’s still pretty awesome: mounted on a gold pedestal in a laboratory in the Carnegie Institute of Washington and then bombarded by ions, a grain of less than a micrometer has confessed that it came from a different star. According to research published in the December issue of „Astronomy & Astrophysics“, the crystal probably formed near a star of intermediate mass, 4 to 7 times that of our Sun, which was nearing the end of its life and had entered the red-giant stage. Lead author Maria Lugaro, an Italian astronomer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, says finding and analyzing similar specks could yield important information about the conditions inside red giants. The speck in question has been christened OC2. No one knows precisely how it got to Earth. It was found in residue left after pieces of three stony meteorites (chondrites) were dissolved in acid to analyze their contents.

https://astronomy.com/News-Observing/News/2006/12/Ruby%20from%20a%20red%20giant.aspx