blue straggler stars?

[kristoffer]

Hubble have found some oddball stars called "blue stragglers". Is it possible to create this in Celestia:

here is the news from NASA:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubbl ... ggler.html

[selden]

Yes and no.

Yes, because they're just stars with spectral classes F5-F0, A, B or O.
No, because Celestia would need to include aged clusters of stars (as individual stars, not the simulated globular clusters currently available).

"Blue stragglers" are stars which are hotter and bluer than they should be given the age of the cluster of which they are members. In other words, they are spectral class F5-F0, A, B or O stars when all of the original such stars in the cluster have aged past that state. Stars with those bright spectral classes have relatively short lifetimes. They quickly use up their hydrogen and helium and grow to be red giants. As a result, there should be no stars with the bright spectral types left in old clusters.

To put it another way, if you have somehow generated a aged cluster of stars to display in Celestia, with none of the brighter spectral classes left, blue stragglers would be additional stars in those clusters which are in the brighter spectral classes.

Does this clarify things at all?

[kristoffer]

here is two stars I have made