[drudd]

I was asked this question on my grad candidacy exam (which was quite a while ago, so my memory is hazy), and I believe stars tend to form binary systems which can halt the runaway gravitational collapse (the potential energy in a hard binary can be a very significant fraction of the total energy of a relatively loosely bound globular cluster).

[jessriedel]

In real life this can happen, but I think only by flinging out stars on escape trajectories. That’s the thing explicitly prevented by the reflecting sphere in the model discussed in the post.

Basically, the issue is that you can’t end up in a stable equilibrium of binaries (and binaries of binaries) in a bounded phase space because the dynamics are time-reversible. The only way you get coarse-grained irreversible behavior is with an unbounded phase space where there are no recurrences.