Density maps of Palomar 5’s stream in the tail coordinate system, where x′is the integrated arc length along the cluster’s orbit and y′ is the distance within the orbital plane. The color scale represents normalized particle counts (total: 100 000). The top panel shows the full simulation with three gaps on the stream’s right-hand side. The next three panels depict simulations with identical initial conditions but exclude the gravitational influence of all clusters except those forming a given gap. The Reference simulation omits the influence from other globular clusters. The bottom panel compares Palomar 5’s observed stream length to the Reference simulation, using the same Monte-Carlo realization as Fig. 1 and Sampling 009 (as seen in the online appendix).