  We use two stellar populations in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae to trace
its dynamical history: blue stragglers and low mass main sequence stars. We
assumed that the blue stragglers were formed through stellar collisions in all
regions of the cluster. We find that in the core of the cluster, models of
collisional blue stragglers agree well with the observations as long as blue
stragglers are still continuing to form and the mass function in the cluster is
extremely biased towards massive stars (x=-8 where a Salpeter mass function has
x=+1.35). We show that such an extreme mass function is supported by direct
measurements of the luminosity function of main sequence stars in the centre of
the cluster. In the middle region of our dataset (25'' to 130'' from the
cluster centre), blue straggler formation seems to have stopped about half a
Gyr ago. In the outskirts of the cluster, our models are least successful at
reproducing the blue straggler data. Taken at face value, they indicate that
blue straggler formation has been insignificant over the past billion years,
and that a Salpeter mass function applies. However, it is more likely that the
dominant formation mechanism in this part of the cluster is not the collisional
one, and that our models are not appropriate for this region of the cluster. We
conclude that blue stragglers can be used as tracers of dynamics in globular
clusters, despite our incomplete understanding of how and where they were
formed.
