What Happens to the Gas in Globular Clusters?

Observations of globular clusters show that they contain much too little gas or dust, compared to what should be present due to the mass-losing stars in the cluster. Many authors have been intrigued by the fate of the gas in globular clusters. They have suggested various mechanisms by which the gas could escape from the cluster, such as stellar UV radiation, cluster winds driven by X-ray bursters, novae, or flare-stars, relativistic winds from millisecond pulsars, condensation into stars, accretion processes drawing upon a central gas reservoir, continuous sweeping of the cluster gas by the gaseous medium of the Galactic halo dots. Recent results also show that globular cluster stars show many abundance anomalies. Accretion of interstellar gas by the cluster stars has been suggested as a plausible mechanism to explain these anomalies. It is also a major ingredient of the EASE scenario linking halo field stars to globular clusters, which we have recently developed to explain strong r-and s-elements correlations in halo field dwarf stars. Here we will briefly review the status of gas and dust detection in globular clusters, as well as the possible gas removal mechanisms. We will explore in more details the gas and dust accretion processes onto main sequence stars. In particular, we will study the efficiency of this mechanism in removing gas from the globular clusters interstellar medium.