Related papers: Microlensing Maps for the Milky Way Galaxy
With the steady increase of the sample size of observed microlenses towards the central regions of the Galaxy, the main source of the uncertainty in the lens mass will shift from the simple Poisson noise to the intrinsic non-uniqueness of…
One of the most important problems in astrophysics concerns the nature of the dark matter in galactic halos, whose presence is implied mainly by the observed flat rotation curves in spiral galaxies. In the framework of a baryonic scenario…
With the increase in the number of observed gravitational wave (GW) signals, detecting strongly lensed GWs by galaxies has become a real possibility. Lens galaxies also contain microlenses (e.g., stars and black holes), introducing further…
We study the prospects for the current microlensing searches, which have recently discovered several candidates, to yield useful information about the flattening of the Galaxy dark matter halo. Models of HI warps and N-body simulations of…
We present preliminary results of the analysis of 5 years of MACHO data on the Galactic bulge microlensing events with clump giants as sources. This class of events allows one to obtain robust conclusions because relatively bright clump…
We present the photometry and theoretical models for a Galactic bulge microlensing event OGLE-2000-BUL-43. The event is very bright with I=13.54 mag, and has a very long time scale, t_E=156 days. The long time scale and its light curve…
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…
The MACHO Project monitors millions of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Small Magellanic Cloud and the bulge of the Milky Way searching for the gravitational microlensing signature of baryonic dark matter. This Project has yielded…
A recent study, making use of the number of horizontal branch stars observed in infrared photometric surveys and kinematic measurements of M-giant stars from the BRAVA survey, combined with N-body simulations of stellar populations, has…
GAIA is the ``super-Hipparcos'' survey satellite selected as a Cornerstone 6 mission by the European Space Agency. GAIA can measure microlensing by the small excursions of the light centroid that occur during events. The all-sky…
Using $N$-body simulations we study the buckling instability in a galactic bar forming in a Milky Way-like galaxy. The galaxy is initially composed of an axisymmetric, exponential stellar disk embedded in a spherical dark matter halo. The…
Complete catalogs of molecular clouds in the Milky Way allow analysis of the molecular medium and the star formation properties of the Milky Way that closely follows the method used for nearby galaxies. We explore whether the big dip in the…
Identifying the structure of our Galaxy has always been fraught with difficulties, and while modern surveys continue to make progress building a map of the Milky Way, there is still much to understand. The arm and bar features are important…
The gravitational fields of astrophysical bodies bend the light around them, creating multiple paths along which light from a distant source can arrive at Earth. Measuring the difference in photon arrival time along these different paths…
We estimate the fraction of mass that is composed of compact objects in gravitational lens galaxies. This study is based on microlensing measurements (obtained from the literature) of a sample of 29 quasar image pairs seen through 20 lens…
The simple physics of microlensing provides a well-understood tool with which to probe the atmospheres of distant stars in the Galaxy and Local Group with high magnification and resolution. Recent results in measuring stellar surface…
In order to understand the nature of the lenses that generate microlensing events, one would like to measure their mass, distance, and velocity. Unfortunately, current microlensing experiments measure only one parameter of the events, the…
Using recent observational data, we construct a set of multi-component equilibrium models of the disk of a Milky Way-like galaxy. The disk dynamics are studied using collisionless-gaseous numerical simulations, based on the joined…
If the dark halo of our galaxy is made of compact objects as massive as M = 10^6 solar masses, their detection by means of ordinary microlensing searches would take a very long time as the characteristic time scale of such a lensing event,…
We describe a new phenomenon of `bar damping' that may have played an important role in shaping the Milky Way bar and bulge as well as its spiral structure. We use a collisionless N-body simulation of a Milky Way-like galaxy initially…