Stellar Encounter Rate in Galactic Globular Clusters

Understand

The high stellar densities in the cores of globular clusters cause significant stellar interactions.

• These stellar interactions can produce close binary mass-transferring systems involving compact objects and their progeny, such as X-ray binaries and radio millisecond pulsars.
• Comparing the numbers of these systems and interaction rates in different clusters drives our understanding of how cluster parameters affect the production of close binaries.
• In this paper we estimate stellar encounter rates (Gamma) for 124 Galactic globular clusters based on observational data as opposed to the methods previously employed, which assumed "King-model" profiles for all clusters.