In our neck of the Galaxy stars are too far apart to be in danger of colliding, but in the dense cores of globular star clusters star collisions may be relatively common. In fact, researchers have evidence that the row of six closely spaced blue stars just below the label in this Hubble Space Telescope image were formed when stars directly collided. 6397's massive stars have long since evolved off the main sequence, exhausting their central supplies of nuclear fuel . However, spectroscopic data show that the indicated stars, descriptively dubbed blue stragglers , are clearly main sequence stars which are too blue and too massive to still be there. Suggestively the stragglers appear to be two and occasionally three times as massive as the lower mass cluster stars otherwise present, supporting evidence for their formation from two and even three star collisions.
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