Related papers: Microlensing Maps for the Milky Way Galaxy
Increasing evidences suggest that the Galactic halo is lumpy on kpc scales due to the accretion of at least a dozen small galaxies (LMC/SMC, Sgr, Fornax etc.). Faint stars in such lumpy structures can significant microlense a background…
The Milky Way is often considered to be the best example of a spiral for which the dark matter not only dominates the outer kinematics, but also plays a major dynamical role in the inner galaxy: the Galactic disk is therefore said to be…
The morphology and kinematics of the spiral structure of the Milky Way is a long-standing problem in astrophysics. In this review we firstly summarize various methods with different tracers used to solve this puzzle. The astrometry of…
Quasar microlensing is both a very useful tool in cosmology and astrophysics, and a source of uncertainty in some studies like the determination of the Hubble constant from lensed quasars. Microlensing probability and time-scales have been…
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…
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 study the wave optics features of gravitational microlensing by a binary lens composed of a planet and a parent star. In this system, the source star near the caustic line produces a pair of images in which they can play the role of…
Microlensing observations have now become a useful tool in searching for non--luminous astrophysical compact objects (brown dwarfs, faint stars, neutron stars, black holes and even planets). Originally conceived for establishing whether the…
Gravitational microlensing provides a new technique for studying the surfaces of distant stars. Microlensing events are detected in real time and can be followed up with precision photometry and spectroscopy. This method is particularly…
The detection of microlensing events from stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud and in the Galactic bulge raise important constraints on the distribution of dark matter and on galactic structure, although some events may be due to a new type…
While microlensing is very rare, occurring on average once per million stars observed, current and near-future surveys are coming online with the capability of providing photometry of almost the entire visible sky to depths up to R ~ 22 mag…
We report the detection of a 282 $^{+34}_{-31}$ pc-sized core in the center of Milky Way dark matter halo at $68\%$ confidence level by using the micro-lensing event rate sky map data from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE)…
Perhaps as many as 30 parallax microlensing events are known, thanks to the efforts of the MACHO, OGLE, EROS and MOA experiments monitoring the bulge. Using Galactic models, we construct mock catalogues of microlensing light curves towards…
Cosmologists have often considered the Milky Way as a typical spiral galaxy, and its properties have considerably influenced the current scheme of galaxy formation. Here we compare the general properties of the Milky Way disk and halo with…
It is conventional to calculate the probability of microlensing for a cosmologically distant source based on the Press-Gunn approximation that the lensing objects are uniformly and randomly distributed in the intervening space with a…
We provide a set of microlensing event rate maps for M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. Rates for M31 microlensing were calculated on the basis of a four component model of the lens and source populations: disk and bulge sources lensed by bulge,…
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…
Extreme microlensing events, defined as events with maximum magnification $A_\max\gsim 200$ are a potentially powerful probe of the mass spectrum and spatial distribution of objects along lines of sight toward the Galactic bulge. About 75…
The spectroscopy of microlensed sources towards the Galactic bulge provides a unique opportunity to study (i) the kinematics of the Galactic bulge, particularly its far-side, (ii) the effects of extinction on the microlensed sources, and…
Gravitational lensing allows us to probe the structure of matter on a broad range of astronomical scales, and as light from a distant source traverses an intervening galaxy, compact matter such as planets, stars, and black holes act as…