Variable Blue Stragglers in the Metal-Poor Globular Clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud - Hodge 11 and NGC1466

Blue straggler stars (BSs) are "rejuvenated" main sequence stars first recognized by Allan Sandage from his observation of the prominent northern globular cluster M3 in the year of 1953. BSs are now known to be present in diverse stellar environments including open clusters, globular clusters, dwarf galaxies, and even the field populations of the Milky Way. This makes them a very useful tool in a wide range of astrophysical applications: Particularly BSs are considered to have a crucial role in the evolution of stellar clusters because they affect on the dynamics, the binary population, and the history of the stellar evolution of the cluster they belong to. Here we report a part of the preliminary results from our ongoing research on the BSs in the two metal-poor globular clusters (GCs) in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), Hodge 11 and NGC1466. Using the high precision multi-band images obtained with the Advanced Camera for Survey (ACS) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we extract time-series photometry to search for the signal of periodic variations in the luminosity of the BSs. Our preliminary results confirm that several BSs are intrinsic "short period (0.05 < P < 0.25 days)" variable stars with either pulsating or eclipsing types. We will discuss our investigation on the properties of those variable BS candidates in the context of the formation channels of these exotic main sequence stars, and their roles in the dynamical evolution of the host star clusters.