I was reading a Wikipedia article on Stephen Hawking and he said it was possible life could be inside stars. Has anybody come up with an idea as to how that could happen?

Existence and nature of extraterrestrial life

Hawking has indicated that he is almost certain that alien life exists in other parts of the universe and uses a mathematical basis for his assumptions. “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.” He believes alien life not only certainly exists on planets but perhaps even in other places, like within stars or even floating in outer space. He also warns that a few of these species might be intelligent and threaten Earth. Contact with such species might be devastating for humanity.[32] “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said. He advocated that, rather than try to establish contact, humans should try to avoid contact with alien life forms.[33]

There’s been a few theories put forth for how. Plenty of SF novels on the subject, certainly. Not life as we would know it, certainly. But if you have a setup with enough complexity, there’s always a chance for something to wake up and wonder if it’s lunchtime.

Just off the top of my head, I’d say some sort of stable plasma vortex, residing in the less-turbulent middle regions of the star, held together by strong magnetic fields. Given the amount of energy passing around, it might have a lifespan of only a few seconds from our perspective, but a lifetime from their angle. Tool use might even be possible, if the tools are jets of plasma and energy.

There’s been a few books that had sentient life living in stars, totally unaware of even the possibility of life on the little bits of cold frozen matter orbiting their homes. I know there was a novel - Dragon’s Egg, I think was the title, that proposed intelligent amoebic life forms on the surface of a neutron star, with neutron reactions replacing chemical ones.

It’s only been recently that hydrothermal vent worms were discovered along with a variety of other animals that live in this extreme heat.  Remove this extreme heat source and they die:  http://media.marine-geo.org/image/tube-worms-near-hydrothermal-vents-epr-2004

I like to call these worms, Earth Tongues since that’s what they seem to be to me and I continue to find them magically amazing. 

Under extreme conditions even here on earth there is life…............so the idea of life within a star is no longer such an impossible idea.

Have to add this pic of thermal life as well since he is a beauty!: 
http://vermicomposters.ning.com/photo/chuckles-the-blood-sucking?xg_source=activity

Yep. Add to that the arsenic-using microbes that NASA discovered. Good times.

For one thing, it depends on where specifically you define as the “inside” of a star.

I greatly doubt that there would be life forming in the very heart of a star.  While we have seen critters living in what we consider to be high temperature and high pressure environments, those environments don’t even begin to compare to a place where the pressure is great enough to cause nuclear fusion.  But the fusion of the helium atoms does create carbon, which is the element often considered to be “the backbone of life”.  So in the parts of the stars further out from the active core, especially in older stars where there has been a larger build-up of heavier elements, I suppose that it could be possible for life to start.  It would probably be totally unlike anything we can imagine, though, and we might never even recognise it as being life.

Then again given the conditions under which that life would be accustomed, it would be extremely unlikely it would ever make a visit to earth.  They would be hard put to maintain an environment like that on our world.

Acci and gray, I agree.  We would not even begin to recognize that kind of ‘life’ and neither would they (if they exist) recognize us.  I do think it’s safe to assume though, given that we also recognize just how limited our understanding presently is, that there is probably a lot of life all around us, sharing this immediate space that we will not or cannot view even under a microscope or theorize based on our current knowledge of physics and science.  But I do have faith in what I hope will be a wider ability in the future.

The past 100 years has watched us take enormous steps, make new discoveries, prove amazing theories and advanced us into an astonishing technological and science age.  Based on the gait of those steps, I cannot believe we will stand still and not continue the march.  The idea of other forms of life in my opinion is more probable than we can even imagine tonight.