MSP abundances as a function of stellar encounter rates. The red points are the observed cumulative number of MSPs as a function of the enclosed encounter rate at a projected radius R (upper x-axis). The red line corresponds to a least-squares linear fit, showing a clear linear dependence. The black points denote the same quantities for the full list of 233 X-ray sources from Henleywillis et al. (2018), while the orange line corresponds to the stellar distribution, normalized to match these sources. These show a distinct, nonlinear, dependence, with encounter rates that are not followed by the MSPs. The orange, dashed line is a linear extrapolation shown for comparison. Lastly, the gray dashed line indicates an upper estimate on the total number of MSPs as a function of total encounter rates of GCs, with 1σ error bands. This is based on the parametric fit performed by Zhao & Heinke (2022) using the phenomenological estimates of Bagchi et al. (2011), based on luminosity functions, and assuming the updated total stellar encounter rates of Bahramian et al. (2013). Units for ω Cen’s total encounter have been normalized to match the 90.4 central value of Bahramian et al. (2013).