HOW TO STEAL A MILLION STARS?

[Sonia]

Based on observations with European Southern Observatory's Very Large

Telescope, a team of Italian astronomers reports that the stellar cluster

Messier 12 must have lost to our Milky Way galaxy close to one million

low-mass stars.

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0602/11stars/

From space flight now

[Astroman]

While this is interesting, (and somewhat simplified), it's not entirely unknown. There was an article in Sky and Telescope a couple years back that gave a great description of what happens to globulars as they orbit the galactic core. Some get stripped of stars as M 12, others get compressed and the core collapses, as M 30. You can usually tell the difference just by observint them. Densely packed, un resolvable cores are of the latter type while looser ones the former.

I'll look up the article hopefully and post a reference. It was fascinating.