This does not mean that some stars aren't being engineered for extra
longevity, but apparently blue stragglers are no longer it.

Though what mainstream astronomer would say otherwise at this time? :^)

“Cannibalism” creates huge stars

Jan. 19, 2009

Courtesy University of Southampton and World Science staff

Oddly bloat­ed stars known as blue strag­glers are prod­ucts of “stel­lar can­ni­bal­ism,” as­tro­no­mers claim.

The sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­s­ity of South­amp­ton, U.K. and Mc­Mas­ter Uni­ver­s­ity in Can­a­da pub­lished the find­ings in the Jan. 15 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Na­ture.

Blue strag­glers are found in groups of stars known as glob­u­lar clus­ters, col­lec­tions of about 100,000 stars tightly bound by gra­vity. With­in these groups, blue strag­glers are heav­i­er and ap­pear young­er in sci­en­tif­ic anal­y­ses than the bulk of their coun­ter­parts.

This vi­o­lates stand­ard the­o­ries of stel­lar ev­o­lu­tion, in which all stars in a clus­ter are born at the same time. Stars as mas­sive as blue strag­glers should have died long ago, ac­cord­ing to these the­o­ries, be­cause more mas­sive stars burn out soon­er. Yet vir­tu­ally eve­ry ob­served clus­ter con­tains some of these over­weight stars.

“The or­i­gin of blue strag­glers has been a long-stand­ing mys­tery. The only thing that was clear is that at least two stars must be in­volved in the crea­t­ion of eve­ry sin­gle blue strag­gler, be­cause iso­lat­ed stars this mas­sive simply should not ex­ist in these clus­ters,” said the Uni­ver­s­ity of South­amp­ton’s Chris­tian Knigge, who led the stu­dy.

Full article here:

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090118_stragglers