.net - What prevents a Thread in C# from being Collected?

Question

In .NET, after this code, what mechanism stops the Thread object from being garbage collected?

new Thread(Foo).Start();
GC.Collect();

Yes, it's safe to assume something has a reference to the thread, I was just wandering what exactly. For some reason Reflector doesn't show me System.Threading, so I can't dig it myself (I know MS released the source code for the .NET framework, I just don't have it handy).

Answer 1

The runtime keeps a reference to the thread as long as it is running. The GC wont collect it as long as anyone still keeps that reference.