Related papers: Gravitational Microlensing and Dark Matter Problem…
Microlensing is the tool of choice for the search and the analysis of compact halo objects ("MACHOs"), a still viable class of dark matter candidates at the galactic scale. Different analyses point towards an agreement in excluding dark…
The current searches for microlensing events towards the galactic bulge can be used to detect planets around the lensing stars. Their effect is a short-term modulation on the smooth lightcurve produced by the main lensing star. Current and…
We describe the feasibility of detecting the gravitational deflection of light emitted by stars moving under the influence of the massive object at the Galactic center. Light emitted by a star orbiting behind the central mass has a smaller…
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 nature and the location of the lenses discovered in the microlensing surveys done so far towards the LMC remain unclear. Motivated by these questions we computed the optical depth for the different intervening populations and the number…
We report the first discovery of a gravitational microlensing candidate towards a new population of source stars, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The candidate event's light curve shows no variation for 3 years before an upward excursion…
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…
This paper uses the caustic crossing events in the microlens data sets to explore the nature and location of the lenses. We conclude that the large majority of lenses, whether they are luminous or dark, are likely to be binaries. Further,…
A non-parametric statistical model is constructed to directly relate The distribution of observed microlens timescales to that of the mass Function of the population from which the lenses are drawn, corrected For observational selection…
In the cold dark matter scenario, dark matter halos are assembled hierarchically from smaller subunits. Some of these subunits are disrupted during the merging process, whereas others survive temporarily in the form of subhalos. A…
We consider the feasibility of directly observing gravitational microlensing in extra-galactic sources, whose stars are not generally resolved. This precludes use of the simple optical depth to microlensing formulation, which is applicable…
The status of searches for gravitational microlensing events of the stars in our galaxy and in other galaxies of the Local Group, the interpretation of the results, some theory, and prospects for the future are reviewed. The searches have…
We present the microlensing optical depth towards the Galactic bulge based on the detection of 99 events found in our Difference Image Analysis (DIA) survey. This analysis encompasses three years of data, covering ~ 17 million stars in ~ 4…
The effect of stars on the lensing properties of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center is similar to the effect of planets on microlensing by a star. We show that the dense stellar cluster around SgrA* increases by factors of a…
Using neural networks, Belokurov, Evans & Le Du (2003, 2004) showed that 7 out of the 29 microlensing candidates towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) of the MACHO collaboration are consistent with blended microlensing and added Gaussian…
It has been shown by Paczy\'nski that gravitational microlensing is a useful method to detect brown dwarfs in the dark halo of our galaxy. At present several experiments are carried out to monitor several million stars in the Large…
The microlensing surveys MACHO, EROS, MOA and OGLE (hereafter called MEMO) have searched for microlensing toward the Large Magellanic Cloud for a cumulated duration of 27 years. We study the potential of joining these databases to search…
We compute a microlensing map for the Galactic bar. The predicted event rate and event duration distribution are consistent with the $55$ events recently reported by the MACHO and OGLE collaborations. Most of the events are due to lensing…
We study the benefits of polarimetry observations of microlensing events to detect and characterize circumstellar disks around the microlensed stars located at the Galactic bulge. These disks which are unresolvable from their host stars…
Automatic classification of variability is now possible with tools like neural networks. Here, we present two neural networks for the identification of microlensing events -- the first discriminates against variable stars and the second…