Blue Stragglers in the Gaia Era: Galactic Open and Globular Clusters

Abstract

Blue Straggler Stars (BSSs) are one of the keys to understand in a better way how stars evolve and interact with each other in different star clusters. They appear to be hotter and brighter than the Main Sequence Turn Off Point (MSTO) and, therefore, they should have evolved off the Main-Sequence branch. We properly select, for Open Clusters (OCs) and Globular Clusters (GCs), star cluster members based on proper motions and parallaxes provided by Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3). Using isochrones models and selection criteria from previous studies, we select and classify stars as BSS, Yellow Straggler Stars and Red Stragglers Stars (evolved BSSs). We identify BSSs to be present in all our GCs and in 42/129 (∼ 33 %) of studied OCs. We counted a total of 4399 BSSs; 434 (∼ 10 %) located in OCs and 3965 (90 %) located in GCs. Clusters younger than ∼ 500 Myr do not show the presence of BSSs in our sample. We obtain astrophysical parameters from 3 different methods (color–temperature relations, isochrone–fitting models and parameters from Gaia DR3 spectra) such as the effective temperature Teff, star mass M, and surface gravity log(g). We find values for BSS Teff to be ∼ (6800 ± 585) K in GCs and ∼ (7570 ± 1400) K in OCs; and an average mass of ⟨MBSS⟩ = (1.75 ± 0.45) M⊙ in OCs and ⟨MBSS⟩ = (1.02 ± 0.1) M⊙ in GCs. For every BSS, we compute the difference of the BSS mass and the MSTO mass of its parent cluster, normalized by the MSTO mass, and called it Me based on previous studies. This parameter is classified as low–Me (Me < 0.5, BSS likely formed through mass-transfer) and high–Me (0.5 < Me < 1.0, BSS likely formed through mergers). For OCs we find a percentage 81.34 % high–Me and 18.66 % low–Me. For GCs, we find 94.25 % low–Me and 5.25 % high–Me. Comparing Me against the BSS age obtained with isochrone modes, we were able to detect: i) GC BSSs that are most likely to be formed through collisions show a “boost” in their percentage/fraction for stars with an age ∼ 1 − 2 Gyr, in agreement with reported age for core-collapse events in GCs found in previous studies; ii) a double sequence for GC BSSs, where we conclude that these sequences correspond to a pre merger/closer-binary interaction and post merger/closer-binary interaction of BSS formation