Related papers: Modeling blue stragglers in young clusters
Blue straggler star (BSS) candidates have been observed in all old dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs), however whether or not they are authentic BSSs or young stars has been a point of debate. To both address this issue and obtain a better…
The old (7 Gyr) open cluster NGC 188 has yielded a wealth of astrophysical insight into its rich blue straggler population. Specifically, the NGC 188 blue stragglers are characterized by: A binary frequency of 80% for orbital periods less…
The level of central segregation of Blue Straggler stars proved to be an excellent tracer of the dynamical evolution of old star clusters (the so-called "dynamical clock"), both in the Milky Way and in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The…
Spectro-seismic measurements of red giants enabled the recent discovery of stars in the thick disk that are more massive than 1.4 M_sun. While it has been claimed that most of these stars are younger than the rest of the typical thick disk…
Blue stragglers are anomalously luminous core hydrogen-burning stars formed through mass-transfer in binary/triple systems and stellar collisions. Their physical and evolutionary properties are largely unknown and unconstrained. Here we…
Blue straggler stars (BSS) are peculiar objects which normally appear as a single broad sequence along the extension of the main sequence. Only four globular clusters (GCs) have been observed to have two distinct and parallel BSS sequences.…
Stellar population models are commonly calculated using star clusters as calibrators for those evolutionary stages that depend on free parameters. However, discrepancies exist among different models, even if similar sets of calibration…
We have used ESO telescopes at La Silla and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in order to obtain accurate B,V,I CCD photometry for the stars located within 200" (~= 2 half-mass radii, r_h = 1.71') from the center of the cluster NGC 6101.…
Blue compact galaxies (BCGs) are compact galaxies that are dominated by intense star formation. Comparing the observational properties with the predictions of stellar population synthesis model, we have analyzed the nuclear stellar…
This paper is part of a series devoted to the study of the stellar populations in brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs), aimed at setting constraints on the formation and evolution of these objects. We have obtained high signal-to-noise ratio,…
We discuss the main properties of the Galactic globular cluster (GC) blue straggler stars (BSS), as inferred from our new catalog containing nearly 3000 BSS. The catalog has been extracted from the photometrically homogeneous V vs. (B-V)…
We present first results from an on-going survey of the stellar populations of the bulges and inner disks of spirals at various points along the Hubble sequence. In particular, we are investigating the hypotheses that bulges of early-type…
Theory and observations suggest that single-star evolution is not able to produce black holes (BHs) with masses in the range $3-5M_{\odot}$ and above $\sim 45M_{\odot}$, referred to as the lower mass gap (LMG) and the upper mas gap (UMG),…
Integrated spectroscopy is the method of choice for deriving the ages of unresolved stellar systems. However, hot stellar evolutionary stages, such as hot horizontal branch stars and blue straggler stars (BSSs), can affect the integrated…
We present a detailed investigation of the radial distribution of blue straggler star and binary populations in the Galactic globular cluster NGC 5466, over the entire extension of the system. We used a combination of data acquired with the…
In this paper, we consider triple systems composed of main-sequence (MS) stars, and their internal evolution due to stellar and binary evolution. Our focus is on triples that produce white dwarfs (WDs), where Roche lobe overflow of an…
We study the production of main sequence mergers of tidally-synchronized primordial short-period binaries. The principal ingredients of our calculation are the angular momentum loss rates inferred from the spindown of open cluster stars and…
Most of massive stars form in binary or higher-order systems in clumpy, sub-structured clusters. In the very first phases of their life, these stars are expected to interact with the surrounding environment, before being released to the…
We use smoothed-particle hydrodynamics to examine differences between direct collisions of single stars and binary star mergers in their roles as possible blue straggler star formation mechanisms. We find in all cases that core helium in…
We investigate the stellar masses of the class of star-forming objects known as Luminous Compact Blue Galaxies (LCBGs) by studying a sample of galaxies in the distant cluster MS$~$0451.6-0305 at $z\approx0.54$ with ground-based multicolor…