Blue straggler stars beyond the Milky Way. III. Detection of evolved
  blue straggler candidates in Large Magellanic Cloud clusters
  We analyze {\sl Hubble Space Telescope} observations of nine Large Magellanic
Cloud star clusters with ages of 1--2 Gyr to search for evolved counterparts of
blue straggler stars. Near the red clump regions in the clusters'
color--magnitude diagrams, we find branches of evolved stars that are much
brighter than normal evolved stars. We examine the effects of photometric
artifacts, differential reddening, and field contamination. We conclude that
these bright evolved stars cannot be explained by any of these effects. Our
statistical tests show that the contributions of photometric uncertainties and
crowding effects, as well as that owing to differential reddening, to these
bright evolved stars are insufficient to fully explain the presence of these
bright evolved stars. Based on isochrone fitting, we also ruled out the
possibility that these bright evolved stars could be reproduced by an internal
chemical abundance spread. The spatial distributions of the bright evolved
stars exhibit clear concentrations that cannot be explained by homogeneously
distributed field stars. This is further confirmed based on Monte Carlo-based
tests. By comparing our observations with stellar evolution models, we find
that the masses of most of bright evolved stars do not exceed twice the average
mass of normal evolved stars. We suggest that these bright evolved stars are,
in fact, evolved blue straggler stars.
