George Preston
Carnegie Observatories
COLLOQUIUM
Tuesday, February 23, 1999
4:10 pm Room 118 PA
Refreshments at 3:45 in Room 224 PA
RESULTS OF A SEARCH FOR BINARIES IN A BMP SAMPLE: IMPLICATIONS FOR MILKY WAY SATELLITE CAPTURE AND FORMATION OF BLUE STRAGGLERS
Blue Metal-Poor(BMP) stars are believed to be a mixture of blue stragglers, which fake their relative youth by capturing mass from their dying companions (stellar facelifts), and truly intermediate-age stars captured from Milky Way satellites, where star formation and chemical evolution generally proceed at more leisurely rates. I am using my search for spectroscopic binaries in a BMP sample to estimate the fractions of these two components and to draw conclusions about the process by which blue stragglers are formed.