Free Term Paper on "Blue Stragglers"
Blue Stragglers
Scientists have recently found that odd stars known,
as
“blue stragglers” may be the product of collision between two, and possibly
more, older stars. This may result in finding out a 50 year-old mystery of the
blue stragglers.
Even in “dense” areas stars a typically billions, if not,
trillions, of miles apart. But stars may have the occasional chance to collide
in global clusters, which are dense groupings of up to a million stars wit
tightly packed cores. Some global clusters are among the oldest structures in
the universe, about 15 billion years old, all the stars in the clusters are
known as red giants that have puffed up to there outermost atmospheres. In these
clusters the presence of blue stragglers have baffled astronomers since the
1950’s. Each of these stars less than a billion years old.
Scientist
recently realized that the collision of the older stars in the clusters could
merge together to form one young one. Because of the stars mass a color
determining the age of the star. Red being cool, blue being hot. Heavy stars
burning fast, lighter stars undergoing a slow burn.
Blue stragglers appear
to be formed by the collision of stars known as main sequence turnoff stars.
These are stars that have reached the end of their lives and are about to become
red giants. Four of the Five blue stragglers examined were just the mass the
astronomers expected had two stars collided. The fifth was so much heavier than
expected that Saffer, C. Rex, of Villanova University, suspects that three or
more stars collided from it. When astronomers have made a computer model, and
one scenario is that a lighter star crashes into a heavier one at 500,000 miles
per hour, leaving behind a huge wake. Then buries itself at the core of the
larger star, setting up massive shock waves on the star’s surface. The newly
formed, combined star can take anywhere from hundered of thousands of years to
ten million years to settle down into a new, stable star.
Other astronomers
are looking for “near-misses”. If two stars deal each other a glancing blow, a
red giant could conceivably have its outer atmosphere stripped away, exposing it
hot core, which is normally destined to become a compact star known as a white
dwarf. Adrienne Cool, an astronomer at San Francisco University, may have found
some of these, which appear to be much less massive than typical white dwarfs.
\"Crasing Stars Create Hot Blue Youths.\" Today\'s Science On File
August 2000:312.