Related papers: High precision microlensing maps of the Galactic b…
Cosmological surveys must correct their observations for the reddening of extragalactic objects by Galactic dust. Existing dust maps, however, have been found to have spatial correlations with the large-scale structure of the Universe.…
The MACHO project carries out regular photometric monitoring of millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds and Galactic Bulge, to search for very rare gravitational microlensing events due to compact objects in the galactic halo and disk. A…
Dust in galaxies can be mapped by either the FIR/sub-mm emission, the optical or infrared reddening of starlight, or the extinction of a known background source. We compare two dust extinction measurements for a set of fifteen sections in…
We study the benefits of polarimetry observations of microlensing events to detect and characterize circumstellar disks around the microlensed stars located at the Galactic bulge. These disks which are unresolvable from their host stars…
The spatial distribution of compact dark matter in our Galaxy can be determined in a few years of monitoring Galactic globular clusters for microlensing. Globular clusters are the only dense fields of stars distributed throughout the…
We propose counting peaks in weak lensing (WL) maps, as a function of their height, to probe models of dark energy and to constrain cosmological parameters. Because peaks can be identified in two-dimensional WL maps directly, they can…
We find that significant incompleteness in stellar number counts results in a significant overestimate of the microlensing optical depth $\tau$ and event rate per star per year $\Gamma$ toward the Galactic bulge from the first two years of…
We study a sample of 16 microlensed Galactic bulge main sequence turnoff region stars for which high dispersion spectra have been obtained with detailed abundance analyses. We demonstrate that there is a very strong and highly statistically…
The color-magnitude diagrams of $\sim 7 \times 10^5$ stars obtained for 12 fields across the Galactic bulge with the OGLE project reveal a well-defined population of bulge red clump giants. We find that the distributions of the apparent…
With a handful of measurements of limb-darkening coefficients, galactic microlensing has already proven to be a powerful technique for studying atmospheres of distant stars. Survey campaigns such as OGLE-III are capable of providing ~ 10…
The Galactic Centre is of fundamental astrophysical interest, but existing near-infrared surveys fall short to cover it adequately. We introduce the GALACTICNUCLEUS survey, a $JHK_s$ imaging survey of the centre of the Milky Way with a…
We analyze five years of PLANET photometry of microlensing events toward the Galactic bulge to search for the short-duration deviations from single lens light curves that are indicative of the presence of planetary companions to the primary…
We use a temperature map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) obtained using the South Pole Telescope at 150 GHz to construct a map of the gravitational convergence to z ~ 1100, revealing the fluctuations in the projected mass density.…
The high cosmological precision offered by the next generation of galaxy surveys hinges on improved corrections for Galactic dust extinction. We explore the possibility of estimating both the dust extinction and large-scale structure from a…
We used optical images acquired with the UVIS channel of the Wide Field Camera 3 on board of the Hubble Space Telescope to construct the first high-resolution extinction map in the direction of NGC 6440, a globular cluster located in the…
We present the first stellar density profile of the Milky Way bulge reaching latitude $b=0^\circ$. It is derived by counting red clump stars within the colour\--magnitude diagram constructed with the new PSF-fitting photometry from VISTA…
The Galactic globular clusters (GGCs) located towards the Galactic bulge have generally been excluded from large-scale photometric GGC surveys due to severe total and differential extinction. Here, we present an overview of a Hubble Space…
In an effort to secure, refine and supplement the relation between central Supermassive Black Hole masses (Mbh), and the bulge luminosities of their host galaxies, (Lbul), we obtained deep, high spatial resolution K-band images of 35 nearby…
We present preliminary results of the analysis of 5 years of MACHO data on the Galactic bulge microlensing events with clump giants as sources. In particular, we discuss: 1) the selection of `giant' events, 2) distribution of impact…
Galaxies behind the Milky Way suffer size reduction and dimming due to their obscuration by dust in the disk of our Galaxy. The degree of obscuration is wavelength dependent. It decreases towards longer wavelengths. Compared to the optical,…