Related papers: The MACHO project: Microlensing Optical Depth towa…
We present the analysis of the first two years of the OGLE search for gravitational lenses towards the Galactic bulge. We detected 9 microlensing events in an algorithmic search of $ \sim 10^8 $ measurements of $ \sim 10^6 $ stars. The…
The MACHO Project is searching for galactic dark matter in the form of massive compact halo objects (Machos). Millions of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and Galactic bulge are photometrically…
Aims. We seek to probe the Galactic bulge IMF starting from microlensing observations. Methods. We analyse the recent results of the microlensing campaigns carried out towards the Galactic bulge presented by the EROS, MACHO and OGLE…
We estimate the optical depth to self-lensing by stars in the Galactic bulge using the HST star counts of Holtzman et al and Zoccali et al as extrapolated by Gould into the brown-dwarf and remnant regimes and deprojected along the line of…
I present a new analysis of the MACHO Project 5.7 year Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) microlensing data set that incorporates the effects of contamination of the microlensing event sample by variable stars. Photometric monitoring of MACHO LMC…
We present a catalog of 450 high signal-to-noise microlensing events observed by the MACHO collaboration between 1993 and 1999. The events are distributed throughout our fields and, as expected, they show clear concentration toward the…
This is a preliminary report on the application of Difference Image Analysis (DIA) to galactic bulge images. The aim of this analysis is to increase the sensitivity to the detection of gravitational microlensing. We discuss how the DIA…
EROS has been monitoring few million stars in the Magellanic clouds, as well as toward the Galactic bulge and spiral arms since 1996, to search for microlensing events. In this paper, we present briefly the EROS setup and scientific program…
A large number of microlensing events have been observed in the direction of the Galactic bulge, with a measured optical depth in the range 2 - 3 x 10^{-6}. It has been shown that most of these events are due to bulge stars being lensed by…
We present detailed maps of the microlensing optical depth and event density over an area of 195 sq. deg towards the Galactic bulge. The maps are computed from synthetic stellar catalogues generated from the Besancon Galaxy Model, which…
Galactic bulge microlensing surveys provide a probe of Galactic structure. We present the first field-by-field comparison between microlensing observations and the Besan\c{c}on population synthesis Galactic model. Using an updated version…
More reliable constraints on the microlensing optical depth comes from a better understanding of the Galactic model. Based on well-constrained Galactic bulge and disk models constructed from survey observations, such as, HST, 2MASS, and…
If the massive compact halo object (MACHO) fraction of the Galactic dark halo is f ~ 20% as suggested by some microlensing experiments, then about 1.2% of lensing events toward the Galactic bulge are due to MACHOs. For the 40% of these that…
The dependence of microlensing time scale frequency distributions and optical depth toward the galactic center on galactic model parameters is explored in detail for a distribution of stars consisting of the Zhao (1996) bar and nucleus and…
We present an analysis of the longest timescale microlensing events discovered by the MACHO Collaboration during a 7 year survey of the Galactic bulge. We find 6 events that exhibit very strong microlensing parallax signals due, in part, to…
We present microlensing calculations for a Galactic model based on Han & Gould (2003), which is empirically normalised by star counts. We find good agreement between this model and data recently published by the MACHO and OGLE…
We review recent gravitational microlensing results from the EROS, MACHO, and OGLE collaborations, and present some details of the very latest MACHO results toward the Galactic Bulge. The MACHO collaboration has now discovered in excess of…
The EROS-2 project has been designed to search for microlensing events towards any dense stellar field. The densest parts of the Galactic spiral arms have been monitored to maximize the microlensing signal expected from the stars of the…
Currently, gravitational microlensing survey experiments toward the Galactic bulge field utilize two different methods of minimizing blending effect for the accurate determination of the optical depth \tau. One is measuring \tau based on…
Following the suggestion of Gould and Depoy (1998) we investigate the feasibility of studying the brightest microlensing events towards the Galactic bulge using a small aperture (~10 cm) telescope. We used one of the HAT telescopes to…