Interstellar Matter in Globular Clusters
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.Memoirs of Sherlock HolmesThe source for intracluster matter is seen in various mass loss processes ongoing within clusters and is supported by the theoretical need for mass loss to explain the morphology of cluster colormagnitude diagrams. A variety of techniques ranging from X-ray to radio wavelengths have been employed to search for such matter but with few exceptions has not been found. The amount of material expected to collect between cleansing passages through the galactic plane has variously been estimated at between ∼ 102 and ∼ 103 M⊙. In contrast, observed upper limits for many clusters are well below these values, often > 1 M⊙. The few detections are at levels of ≲10−2 M⊙.