A Gaia Test of Published and Preprint Predictions for Stars Ejected from Milky Way Globular Clusters

Two models, one published and one a preprint, predict populations of stars ejected from Milky Way globular clusters by encounters with stellar-mass compact objects. Evans et al. (2025) predict the population in aggregate with Gaia detectability applied, and Cabrera and Rodriguez (2023) publish per-cluster sky and proper-motion credible regions for the whole-lifetime ejecta.

This paper reports no count for a registered test of both predictions in Gaia DR3 and, under the preregistered switch rule, in DR4. The test asks whether the pre-declared predicted regions hold the predicted excess over a field background estimated from rotated control regions. The registration carries a blinded power gate that is evaluated on control-region counts and template-derived quantities before any signal-region count is opened, and it treats a gate stop as a reportable outcome.

The result is an infeasibility. The preregistered Arm C validation cannot be scored on the archive as published, because the archive withholds the recent-window positions the transform needs. A second and independent finding is that the arm could not have been run at the registered design in any case: the registered information floor asks for 118 detectable stars in a single cluster against an arm-wide predicted total of about 130. The Methods section records the registered design with each number traced to its source line, the Results section names the byte-level cause and the Stage 0 quantities behind the floor, and the deviations table records both findings in the eleven-field form.