Stellar encounter rates in Galactic GCs

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. By deprojecting cluster surface brightness profiles to estimate luminosity density profiles, we treat "King-model" and "core-collapsed" clusters in the same way. In addition, we use Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the effects of uncertainties in various observational parameters (distance, reddening, surface brightness) on {Gamma}, producing the first catalog of globular cluster stellar encounter rates with estimated errors.