Abstract
The origin of unusually hot stars in a sparse cluster has been attributed to their being members of binary systems rather than stellar collisions. This prompts a rethink of how stars merge when they collide. See Letter p.356 Blue straggler stars challenge the standard theory of stellar evolution, as these main sequence stars are brighter and bluer than others in a cluster thought to have formed at about the same time. In theory, they should have already evolved into giants and stellar remnants. Explanations offered to account for these stragglers include stellar collisions, mass transfer from a companion star or mergers in binaries. Aaron Geller and Robert Mathieu have combined precise observations spanning more than a decade with numerical simulations to show that the binary companions of the majority of the blue stragglers in the old open cluster NGC 188 are consistent with a mass transfer origin, and inconsistent with predictions of the other suggested formation channels.
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