Related papers: An inner ring and the micro lensing toward the Bul…
Galactic bulges are central to understanding galaxy formation and evolution. Here we report on recent studies using micro-lensing events to obtain spectra of high resolution and moderately high signal-to-noise ratios of dwarf stars in the…
Four microlensing collaborations are presently searching for compact matter in the Galaxy and all have detected possible candidates. Using the detection efficiencies recently published by the MACHO and OGLE collaborations, we present…
We report the detection of 45 candidate microlensing events in fields toward the Galactic bulge. These come from the analysis of 24 fields containing 12.6 million stars observed for 190 days in 1993. Many of these events are of extremely…
Because we know little about the Galactic force-field away from the plane, the Galactic mass distribution is very ill-determined. I show that a microlensing survey of galaxies closer than 50 Mpc would enable us to map in three dimensions…
Paczy\'nski (1986) suggested that ``dark" objects in the halo of our Galaxy could enhance the luminosity of foreground stars, acting as gravitational microlenses. Such events has been recently reported by different collaborations. We assume…
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…
We study gravitational lensing by spiral galaxies, using realistic models consisting of halo, disk, and bulge components combined to produce a flat rotation curve. Proper dynamical normalization of the models is critical because a disk…
We present an analysis of structural features of all known galaxies with optical polar rings. We find a clear dichotomy for objects of this peculiar class. Bulge-dominated S0 galaxies possess only short narrow rings, while disk-dominated…
We investigate the effect of blending in future gravitational microlensing surveys by carrying out simulation of Galactic bulge microlensing events to be detected from a proposed space-based lensing survey. From this simulation, we find…
Outer rings are located at the greatest distance from the galaxy center of any feature resonant with a bar. Because of their large scale, their morphology is sensitive to the distribution of the dark matter in the galaxy. We introduce here…
We propose a new method that can be used to constrain the properties of the Galactic bar (bulge). If the majority of the lensing objects are in the Galactic bar, then we predict a systematic offset in the apparent magnitude between lensed…
Although a source star is fainter than the detection limit imposed by crowding, it is still possible to detect an event if the star is located in the seeing disk of a bright star is and gravitationally amplified: amplification bias. Using a…
I review some of the work on bars which is closely linked to the bar/bulge system in our Galaxy. Several independent studies, using totally independent methods, come to the same results about the 3D structure of a bar, i.e., that a bar is…
We present an re-analysis of the longest timescale gravitational microlensing event discovered to date: MACHO-99-BLG-22/OGLE-1999-BUL-32, which was discovered by both the MACHO and OGLE microlensing alert systems. Our analysis of this…
While galactic bulges may contain no significant dust of their own, the dust within galaxy discs can strongly attenuate the light from their embedded bulges. Furthermore, such dust inhibits the ability of observationally-determined…
We present a measurement of the microlensing optical depth toward the Galactic Bulge based on 4 years of the OGLE-II survey using Red Clump Giant (RCG). Using 32 events we find tau=2.55_{-0.46}^{+0.57}* 10^{-6} at (l,b)=(1.16, -2.75).…
We examine the most recent observational constraints arising from i) small-scale and large-scale Galactic dynamical properties, ii) star counts at faint magnitude and iii) microlensing experiments. From these constraints, we determine the…
The inner Milky Way is dominated by a boxy, triaxial bulge which is believed to have formed through disk instability processes. Despite its proximity, its large-scale properties are still not very well known, due to our position in the…
It has been shown by Paczy\'nski that gravitational microlensing is potentially a useful method for detecting the dark constituents of the halo of our galaxy, if their mass lies in the approximate domain $10^{-6}<M/M_\odot<10^{-1}$.…
We present a new EROS-2 measurement of the microlensing optical depth toward the Galactic Bulge. Light curves of $5.6\times 10^{6}$ clump-giant stars distributed over $66 \deg^2$ of the Bulge were monitored during seven Bulge seasons. 120…