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Título               : On the Evaporation of Globular Clusters  
Conferencista: Georges Meylan, ESO-Garching  
Data                  : Sexta-Feira, 23/03/01 15H30M  
Local                 : Auditório L.B.F. Clauzet - Água Funda  
Sumário           :
Galactic globular clusters, which are ancient building blocks of our Galaxy, represent a very interesting family of stellar systems in which some fundamental dynamical processes have taken place on time scales shorter than the age of the Universe. In contrast with galaxies, these clusters represent unique laboratories for learning about two-body relaxation, mass segregation from equipartition of energy, stellar collisions, stellar mergers, and core collapse. All these phenomena, combined with the effects of disk and bulge crossing suffered by each globular cluster along its orbital path, favor the regular escape of stars from these stellar systems, leading to their slow evaporation. I shall present recent observational results which confirm the fact that globular clusters are not the everlasting swarm of stars that, not so long ago, we thought they were.