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Article: The stellar vampires. (blue straggler stars)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- April 17, 1993
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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FOUR decades ago, while watching a distant star cluster, Allan Sandage of the Carnegie Observatories in California came across a type of star that has baffled astronomers ever since. Blue stragglers are too blue and too bright to be normal. If they started life as hot and massive as their present brilliance suggests, they should long since have burnt up most of the hydrogen which fuels a star's youthful exuberances, and settled into the cool, red glow of old age. Blue stragglers, in other words, seem to have discovered an astrophysical elixir of life.
Since Dr Sandage's discovery, astronomers have found blue stragglers in many clusters. Exactly how these enigmatic ...