Primordial Binary Evolution and Blue Stragglers

TL;DR

This study uses binary population synthesis to analyze how primordial binary evolution produces blue stragglers and impacts the spectral energy distributions of star clusters over time.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of blue straggler formation via primordial binary evolution and its effects on cluster properties, highlighting the importance of mass transfer efficiency.

Findings

Blue stragglers can form at any time from primordial binary evolution.

The frequency of blue stragglers varies non-monotonically with age.

Primordial binary evolution significantly influences ultraviolet and blue spectral bands.

Abstract

In this paper, we systematically studied blue stragglers produced from primordial binary evolution via a binary population synthesis approach, and examined their contribution to the integrated spectral energy distributions of the host clusters. The mass transfer efficiency, $\beta$, is an important parameter for the final products (then blue stragglers) after mass transfer, and it is set to be 0.5 except for case A binary evolution. The study shows that primordial binary evolution may produce blue stragglers at any given times and that different evolutionary channels are corresponding for blue stragglers in different visual magnitude regions (in V band) on the colour-magnitude diagram (CMD) of clusters. The specific frequency of blue stragglers obtained from primordial binary evolution decreases with time first, and then increases again when the age is larger than 10Gyr, while that from angular momentum loss induced by magnetic braking in low-mass binaries increases with time and exceeds that of primordial binary evolution in a population older than 3 Gyr. Meanwhile, blue stragglers resulting from primordial binary evolution are dominant contributors to the ISEDs in ultraviolet and blue bands in a population between 0.3 and 2.0 Gyr. The value of $\beta$ significantly affects on the final results. For old open clusters, the assumption of $\beta =1$ when the primary is in HG at the onset of mass transfer matches the observations better than that of $\beta =0.5$ from the locations of BSs on the CMDs. Our study also shows that, for most Galactic open clusters, the specific frequency of blue stragglers obtained from our simulations is lower than that of observations, which is puzzling.