SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
New microlensing parallax observations have been able to determine the masses of, and distances to, two small, isolated stars. One has a mass of about 0.6 solar-masses and is about 23,700 light-years away from us; modeling for the second is ambiguous, concluding that it is either 0.40 solar-masses at about 24,800 light-years or 0.38 solar-masses at 24,300 light-years distant. Both stars are red giants, and lie in the peanut-shaped bulge of old stars (about ten billion years old) in the Milky Way, about seven thousand light-years in radius in the central region of our galaxy. The new results, together with six earlier parallax microlensing measurements, lend strong support to current models of the Galaxy and its bulge formation.
Journal Reference:
Weicheng Zang et al. Spitzer Microlensing Parallax Reveals Two Isolated Stars in the Galactic Bulge, The Astrophysical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab6ff8
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Sunday April 05 2020, @01:46AM
Any astronomer worth their salt knows to "look away" from the Zone of Avoidance, nothing to see there.
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/Z/Zone+Of+Avoidance [swin.edu.au]
The fact that they have identified particular stellar objects in this area is rather tremendous achievement, rivaled only by the ignorance of the off-topic comments in this Fine Thread.