Space Forum / Amateur Astronomy / July 2008

It might be -- though a really spectacular interaction would end up
destroying both stars, and that clearly doesn't always happen (if it
*ever* does) or we'd never find any blue stragglers today.   Stellar
collisions are very rare events.  Even in the dense globular clusters,
it's expected that there might be a couple hundred collisions over the
whole ~10 billion year lifetime of each cluster.  So maybe a few tens of
thousands over the lifetime of our galaxy.  And they'd be brief events,
so unless we were very lucky we'd not see one within our lifetimes.
And, they'd almost certainly happen in the densest part of the core of
the star cluster, so they'd be hard to see clearly if we did catch one.