Publications by authors named "Alessio Mucciarelli"

Blue stragglers are anomalously luminous core hydrogen-burning stars formed through mass-transfer in binary/triple systems and stellar collisions. Their physical and evolutionary properties are largely unknown and unconstrained. Here we analyze 320 high-resolution spectra of blue stragglers collected in eight galactic globular clusters with different structural characteristics and show evidence that the fraction of fast rotating blue stragglers (with rotational velocities larger than 40 km/s) increases for decreasing central density of the host system.

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Stellar ejecta gradually enrich the gas out of which subsequent stars form, making the least chemically enriched stellar systems direct fossils of structures formed in the early Universe. Although a few hundred stars with metal content below 1,000th of the solar iron content are known in the Galaxy, none of them inhabit globular clusters, some of the oldest known stellar structures. These show metal content of at least approximately 0.

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