Blue straggler stars in old open clusters exhibit a Kraft break in rotation, with rapid rotators above the break and slow rotators below, indicating their envelopes behave like those of single stars.
The Critical Importance of Russell's Diagram
2 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
2
Pith papers citing it
abstract
The idea of dwarf and giants stars, but not the nomenclature, was first established by Eijnar Hertzsprung in 1905; his first diagrams in support appeared in 1911. In 1913 Henry Norris Russell could demonstrate the effect far more strikingly because he measured the parallaxes of many stars at Cambridge, and could plot absolute magnitude against spectral type for many points. The general concept of dwarf and giant stars was essential in the galactic structure work of Harlow Shapley, Russell's first graduate student. In order to calibrate the period-luminosity relation of Cepheid variables, he was obliged to fall back on statistical parallax using only 11 Cepheids, a very sparse sample. Here the insight provided by the Russell diagram became critical. The presence of yellow K giant stars in globular clusters credentialed his calibration of the period-luminosity relation by showing that the calibrated luminosity of the Cepheids was comparable to the luminosity of the K giants. It is well known that in 1920 Shapley did not believe in the cosmological distances of Heber Curtis' spiral nebulae. It is not so well known that in 1920 Curtis' plot of the period-luminosity relation suggests that he didn't believe it was a physical relation and also he failed to appreciate the significance of the Russell diagram for understanding the large size of the Milky Way.
fields
astro-ph.SR 2years
2026 2verdicts
UNVERDICTED 2representative citing papers
Blue straggler stars in old open clusters predominantly appear near the terminal-age main sequence because mass transfer from asymptotic giant branch donors enriches their cores with helium.
citing papers explorer
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Blue Straggler Stars in Old Open Clusters and the Kraft Break
Blue straggler stars in old open clusters exhibit a Kraft break in rotation, with rapid rotators above the break and slow rotators below, indicating their envelopes behave like those of single stars.
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The Distribution of Blue Straggler Stars in the Color-Magnitude Diagrams of Old Open Clusters
Blue straggler stars in old open clusters predominantly appear near the terminal-age main sequence because mass transfer from asymptotic giant branch donors enriches their cores with helium.