Three K2 campaigns yield rotation periods for 1013 stars in Praesepe

We use three campaigns of K2 observations to complete the census of rotation in low-mass members of the benchmark, ≈670 Myr old open cluster Praesepe. We measure new rotation periods (Prot) for 220≲1.3 M☉ Praesepe members and recovery periods for 97% (793/812) of the stars with a Prot in the literature. Of the 19 stars for which we do not recover a Prot, 17 were not observed by K2. As K2’s three Praesepe campaigns took place over the course of 3 yr, we test the stability of our measured Prot for stars observed in more than one campaign. We measure Prot consistent to within 10% for >95% of the 331 likely single stars with ≥2 high-quality observations; the median difference in Prot is 0.3%, with a standard deviation of 2%. Nearly all of the exceptions are stars with discrepant Prot measurements in Campaign 18, K2’s last, which was significantly shorter than the earlier two (≈50 days rather than ≈75 days). This suggests that, despite the evident morphological evolution we observe in the light curves of 38% of the stars, Prot measurements for low-mass stars in Praesepe are stable on timescales of several years. A Prot can therefore be taken to be representative even if measured only once

Constraints on blue straggler formation mechanisms in Galactic globular clusters from proper motion velocity distributions

For a sample of 38 Galactic globular clusters (GCs), we confront the observed distributions of blue straggler (BS) proper motions and masses (derived from isochrone fitting) from the BS catalog of Simunovic & Puzia with theoretical predictions for each of the two main competing BS formation mechanisms. These are mass transfer from an evolved donor on to a main-sequence (MS) star in a close binary system, and direct collisions involving MS stars during binary encounters. We use the \texttt{FEWBODY} code to perform simulations of single-binary and binary-binary interactions. This provides collisional velocity and mass distributions for comparison to the observed distributions. Most clusters are consistent with BSs derived from a dynamically relaxed population, supportive of the binary mass-transfer scenario. In a few clusters, including all the post-core collapse clusters in our sample, the collisional velocities provide the best fit