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Why is the presence of blue stragglers surprising?

Answer 1

Blue stragglers seems out of place in open and globular clusters.

Stars in open and globular clusters normally follow a particular curve on the H-R diagram. Blue stragglers are unusual that they are bigger and bluer than the rest of the stars (See picture for reference).

Blue stragglers tend to occur in denser regions of the clusters. They also have masses two to three times that of the other stars. This suggests that they were formed from two or three stars which collided and merged.

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Answer 2

Jordan Andrews

The mechanisms behind the formation of blue stragglers, such as stellar collisions or mass transfer in binary systems, are not fully understood, and they appear younger and more massive than other stars in the same stellar population, challenging standard stellar evolution models that predict their existence.

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Answer from HIX Tutor

When evaluating a one-sided limit, you need to be careful when a quantity is approaching zero since its sign is different depending on which way it is approaching zero from. Let us look at some examples.