Related papers: Pixel lensing: Microlensing towards M31
Dark matter is an important ingredient of galaxies, as was recognised early on by Ken Freeman himself! Evidence for dark matter halos is still indirect, based on analysing motions of tracers such as gas and stars. In a sense the visible…
We present the first M31 candidate microlensing events from the Microlensing Exploration of the Galaxy and Andromeda (MEGA) survey. MEGA uses several telescopes to detect microlensing towards the nearby Andromeda galaxy, M31, in order to…
We report the final analysis of a search for microlensing events in the direction of the Andromeda galaxy, which aimed to probe the MACHO composition of the M31 halo using data collected during the 1998-99 observational campaign at the MDM…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
We discuss pixel lensing observations towards M31 carried out at the Loiano telescope. We have established a fully automatic pipeline for the detection and the characterization of microlensing events. We have evaluated the efficiency of the…
The microlensing of background stars by compact objects in globular clusters is analyzed. The main strength of the proposed search is the direct relationship between the lens mass and the time scale of the microlensing event. The main…
Pixel microlensing, i.e. gravitational microlensing of unresolved stars, can be used to explore distant stellar systems, and as a bonus may be able to detect extragalactic planets. In these studies, binary-lens events with multiple…
Gravitational microlensing provides a unique technique to reveal information about extragalactic planets. A network of at least four 2m-class telescopes distributed around the northern hemisphere could probe 15-35 jupiters and 4-10 saturns…
The gravitational microlensing as a unique astrophysical tool can be used for studying the atmosphere of stars thousands of parsec far from us. This capability results from the bending of light rays in the gravitational field of a lens…
Microlensing has established itself as a powerful new method for the detection of baryonic dark matter in the Galaxy. The theory of microlensing is sketched and its similarity with the optical effect of twinkling is explained. The bulk of…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
Gravitational microlensing is a robust tool to detect and directly measure the abundance and mass of any kind of compact objects, either in our galaxy or in the extragalatic domain. On basis to generic, broadly applicable arguments, it is…
We report the discovery of a short-duration microlensing candidate in the northern field of the POINT-AGAPE pixel lensing survey towards M31. The full-width half-maximum timescale is very short, just 1.8 days. Almost certainly, the source…
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…
Since the first discovery of microlensing events nearly two decades ago, gravitational microlensing has accumulated tens of TBytes of data and developed into a powerful astrophysical technique with diverse applications. The review starts…
Microlensing is now a very popular observational astronomical technique. The investigations accessible through this effect range from the dark matter problem to the search for extra-solar planets. In this review, the techniques to search…
The last decade has shown a considerable development of gravitational lensing for cosmology because it probes the amount and the nature of dark matter, and provides information on the density parameter $\Omega$, the cosmological constant…
It has been suggested that a monitoring program employing the pixel lensing method to search for microlensing events towards galactic globular clusters may increase the statistics and discriminate among different halo models. Stimulated by…
Four ongoing microlensing experiments have produced important new results but also big puzzles, the major one being that the expected classes of lenses cannot account for the observed distribution of time scales. I discuss future…
Gravitational lensing is brightening of background objects due to deflection of light by foreground sources. Rich clusters of galaxies are very effective lenses because they are centrally concentrated. Such natural Gravitational Telescopes…