Related papers: What are MACHOs? Interpreting LMC microlensing
The EROS microlensing survey has monitored nearly 100 million stars for seven years, to search for halo brown dwarfs and compact objects in the Galactic disk. In this paper, we review the various EROS observation programs and the…
While recent sky surveys have uncovered large numbers of ever fainter Milky Way satellites, their classification as star clusters, low-luminosity galaxies, or tidal overdensities remains often unclear. Likewise, their contributions to the…
The flux anomalies in four-image gravitational lenses can be interpreted as evidence for the dark matter substructure predicted by cold dark matter (CDM) halo models. In principle, these flux anomalies could arise from alternate sources…
In recent years various models for the Galactic distribution of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) have been proposed for the interpretation of microlensing toward the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). A direct way to fit the best model is…
The general arguments for baryonic and galactic dark matter are presented. Limits coming from a variety of theoretical considerations and observations are discussed. The surviving candidates for galactic baryonic dark matter seem most…
The existence of compact gravitational lenses, with masses around 0.5 (M_{\odot}), has been reported in the halo of the Milky Way. The nature of these dark lenses is as yet obscure, particularly because these objects have masses well above…
We have searched the Forth Catalogue of Nearby Stars for halo stars and identified 15 subdwarfs and a high velocity white dwarf in the solar neighbourhood. This search was motivated mainly by the recent determinations of MACHO masses of…
We investigate the effects of numerous dark matter subhalos in a galaxy-sized halo on the events of strong lensing, to assess their presence as expected from the cold dark matter scenario. Lens galaxies are represented by a smooth ellipsoid…
A popular interpretation of recent microlensing studies of the line of sight towards the Large Magellanic Cloud invokes a population of old white dwarf stars in the Galactic halo. Below I review the basic properties of old white dwarf stars…
A massive, self-interacting scalar field has been considered as a possible candidate for the dark matter in the universe. We present an observational constraint to the model arising from strong lensing observations in galaxies. The result…
It has been revealed using microlensing that a considerable part, possibly more than half, of the dark matter in the halo of our Galaxy consists of objects with a mass spectrum ranging from 0.05 to 0.8 of the solar mass. What is the nature…
The Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) paradigm makes specific predictions for the abundance, structure, substructure and clustering of dark matter halos, the sites of galaxy formation. These predictions can be directly tested, in the low-mass…
The EROS and MACHO collaborations have reported observations of light curves of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud that are compatible with gravitational microlensing by intervening massive objects, presumably Brown-Dwarf stars. The OGLE…
Halo initial mass functions (IMFs) heavily biased toward white dwarf (WD) precursors ~1-8 Msun have been suggested as a suitable mechanism for explaining MACHO events. However, by simple chemical evolution argument, Gibson & Mould (1997;…
We present photometry and analysis of the microlensing alert MACHO 96-LMC-2. The ~3% photometry provided by the Global Microlensing Alert Network follow--up effort reveals a periodic modulation in the lightcurve. We attribute this to…
Using eight dark matter haloes extracted from fully-self consistent cosmological N-body simulations, we perform microlensing experiments. A hypothetical observer is placed at a distance of 8.5 kpc from the centre of the halo measuring…
We calculate the expected white dwarf luminosity functions and discovery functions in photometric passbands, if these stellar remnants provide a substantial fraction of the sought Galactic dark matter, as suggested on various observational…
We present the results of the EROS2 search for the hidden galactic matter of the halo through the gravitational microlensing of stars in the Magellanic clouds. Microlensing was also searched for and found in the Milky-Way plane, where…
Recent results from gravitational microlensing experiments, such as MACHO, indicate that a substantial fraction of the Galactic dark matter (DM) is in compact form, with a typical mass in the range ~0.05 - 1 Mo. This mass range favours the…
According to the now strongly supported concordance $\Lambda$CDM model, galaxies may be grossly described as a luminous component embedded in a dark matter halo. The density profile of these mass dominating haloes may be determined by N -…