Blue stragglers in NGC 6388

As in several other clusters we have studied, the BSS distribution is found to be bimodal: highly peaked in the cluster center, rapidly decreasing at intermediate radii, and rising again at larger radii. In other clusters the sparsely populated intermediate-radius region (or "zone of avoidance") corresponds well to that part of the cluster where dynamical friction would have caused the more massive BSSs or their binary progenitors to settle to the cluster center.

Instead, in NGC 6388, BSSs still populate a region that should have been cleaned out by dynamical friction effects, thus suggesting that dynamical friction is somehow less efficient than expected. As a by-product of these observations, the peculiar morphology of the horizontal branch (HB) is also confirmed. In particular, within the (very extended) blue portion of the HB we are able to clearly characterize three subpopulations: ordinary blue HB stars, extreme HB stars, and blue hook stars.