The First Detection of Blue Straggler Stars in the Milky Way Bulge

Details The First Detection of Blue Straggler Stars in the Milky Way Bulge The First Detection of Blue Straggler Stars in the Milky Way Bulge

May 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21821705c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #217.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

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We report the first detections of Blue Straggler Stars (BSS) in the bulge of the Milky Way galaxy. Proper motions from extensive space-based observations along a single sight-line allow us to separate a sufficiently clean and well-characterized bulge sample that we are able to detect a small population of bulge objects in the region of the color-magnitude diagram commonly occupied young objects and blue strgglers. However, variability measurements of these objects clearly establish that a fraction of them are blue stragglers. Out of the 42 objects found in this region of the CMD, we estimate that at least 18 are genuine BSS. We normalize the BSS population by our estimate of the number of horizontal branch stars in the bulge in order to compare the bulge to other stellar systems. The BSS fraction is clearly discrepant from that found in stellar clusters. The blue straggler population of dwarf spheroidals remains a subject of debate; some authors claim an anticorrelation between the normalised blue straggler fraction and integrated light. If this trend is real, then the bulge extends it by three orders of magnitude in mass. Conversely, we find that the genuinely young (< 5Gy) population in the bulge, must be at most 3.3% under the most conservative scenario for the BSS population.

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