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Blue stragglers are the weird grandparents of the galaxy - Space.com
Feb 07, 2023 44 secs
The moment they begin fusing hydrogen in their cores, they maintain a strict relationship between their brightness and temperature.

That helium gets in the way of all the fusion fun, forcing the star to burn hydrogen at a faster rate to maintain equilibrium.

For example, red giants are incredibly bright but have relatively cool surfaces — something that can't happen to a hydrogen-burning main sequence star.

While astronomers don't yet have the perfect explanation for what causes blue straggler stars, they do have a rough guess, and it has to do with collisions.

At first, that newly merged star will be both massive and large, with its outer surface flung far away from the core due to the enormous rotation after the collision.

But eventually, some astrophysical process (perhaps strong magnetic fields) drags down the rotation rate of the star, causing it to slow down and settle into equilibrium.

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