Blue Stragglers in Clusters and Integrated Spectral Properties of Stellar Populations

Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Astrophysics and Space Science Library book series (ASSL, volume 413)

Abstract

Blue straggler stars are the most prominent bright objects in the colour-magnitude diagram of a star cluster that challenges the theory of stellar evolution. Star clusters are the closest counterparts of the theoretical concept of simple stellar populations (SSPs) in the Universe. SSPs are widely used as the basic building blocks to interpret stellar contents in galaxies. The concept of an SSP is a group of coeval stars which follows a given distribution in mass, and has the same chemical property and age. In practice, SSPs are more conveniently made by the latest stellar evolutionary models of single stars. In reality, however, stars can be more complicated than just single either at birth time or during the course of evolution in a typical environment. Observations of star clusters show that there are always exotic objects which do not follow the predictions of standard theory of stellar evolution. Blue straggler stars (BSSs), as discussed intensively in this book both observationally and theoretically, are very important in our context when considering the integrated spectral properties of a cluster, or a simple stellar population. In this chapter, we are going to describe how important the contribution of BSSs is to the total light of a cluster.

Keywords

Stellar Population Star Cluster Initial Mass Function Asymptotic Giant Branch Single Star 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Science Foundation of China through grants No. Y111221001 and 10973015. We are also grateful for being invited to this ESO workshop, thanks to the organisers, in particular Giovanni Carraro and Henri Boffin.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.National Astronomical ObservatoriesChinese Academy of SciencesBeijingChina

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