In a paper published last week in the journal Nature, the
researchers report a strong link between the total number of
blue stragglers and the mass of a cluster's core, the dense
central region of stars. "Cluster cores containing more stars
contain more blue stragglers," Knigge said. And the more massive
a cluster, the higher number of binary pairs it contains. "We
see a lot of blue stragglers even in massive cores that have low
collision rates," he added. Michael Rich, an astrophysicist at
the University of California, Los Angeles, said the paper
reports "the first sensible correlation" between the number of
blue stragglers and a property of globular clusters, in this
case, core mass. Rich noted that a 2007 study published in the
journal Astronomy and Astrophysics used different methods to
also suggest that blue stragglers arise from binary pairs
instead of collisions. "As the understanding of blue stragglers
increases, it becomes possible to use these stars to understand
important things about the origins o