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Congratulations to Tomás Cabrera on the submission of his first paper as a graduate student (and the first student-lead paper submitted from our group)! Here, Tomás explored the interactions between compact objects (black holes, white dwarfs, and neutron stars) and luminous stars in the cores of globular clusters. He found that not only can compact-object encounters throw stars out of the cluster with significant speed (sometimes in excess of 2000 km/s), but that they create populations of stars that are on dynamically separate orbits about the Milky Way.

Take, as an example, the globular cluster 47 Tuc: Here, the stars fall off the cluster as it orbits in the galaxy (in gray), but because they can leave the cluster with significant velocities, they often get pushed onto distinct orbits in both position and proper motion space.

Plot showing a series of stars falling off of a globular cluster.

We provided a list of where all the stars thrown out of 147 of the MW globular clusters should be in the present day, as a tool for people to help identify stars as having originated from globular clusters.

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