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| | Planet Quest: SIM Technical Area |
 | | A complete census of the stellar population of the Galaxy will be made by SIM including both ordinary stars and "dark" stars. |
 | | Ordinary stars, burning their nuclear fuel and shining, can perhaps best be studied with traditional astronomical techniques, but dark stars, by which we include old brown dwarfs, fl holes, old white dwarfs, neutron stars, and perhaps exotic objects such as mirror matter stars or primordial fl holes, can only be studied by their gravitational effects. |
 | | The only way to examine the field population of these dark stars is through microlensing, the deflection of light from a visible star in the background by an object (dark or not) in the foreground. |
| planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov /SIM/sim_stellar_astro.cfm (1034 words) |
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