The First Detection of Blue Straggler Stars in the Milky Way Bulge
  We report the first detections of Blue Straggler Stars (BSS) in the bulge of
the Milky Way galaxy. Proper motions from extensive space-based observations
along a single sight-line allow us to separate a sufficiently clean and
well-characterized bulge sample that we are able to detect a small population
of bulge objects in the region of the color-magnitude diagram commonly occupied
young objects and blue strgglers. However, variability measurements of these
objects clearly establish that a fraction of them are blue stragglers. Out of
the 42 objects found in this region of the color-magnitude diagram, we estimate
that at least 18 are genuine BSS. We normalize the BSS population by our
estimate of the number of horizontal branch stars in the bulge in order to
compare the bulge to other stellar systems. The BSS fraction is clearly
discrepant from that found in stellar clusters. The blue straggler population
of dwarf spheroidals remains a subject of debate; some authors claim an
anticorrelation between the normalised blue straggler fraction and integrated
light. If this trend is real, then the bulge may extend it by three orders of
magnitude in mass. Conversely, we find that the genuinely young (~5Gy or
younger) population in the bulge, must be at most 3.4% under the most
conservative scenario for the BSS population.
