Related papers: Bulge Microlensing Optical Depth from EROS 2 obser…
The abundance and narrow magnitude dispersion of Red Clump (RC) stars make them a popular candidate for mapping the morphology of the bulge region of the Milky Way. Using an estimate of the RC's intrinsic luminosity function, we extracted…
The position of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 at the center of the Virgo Cluster means that the inferred column density of dark matter associated with both the cluster halo and the galaxy halo is quite large. This system is thus an…
I present a new analysis of the MACHO Project 5.7 year Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) microlensing data set that incorporates the effects of contamination of the microlensing event sample by variable stars. Photometric monitoring of MACHO LMC…
All current Bulge-Disk models for the inner Galaxy fall short of reproducing self-consistently the observed micro-lensing optical depth by a factor of two ($> 2\sigma$). We show that the least mass-consuming way to increase the optical…
We developed a parametric Galactic model toward the Galactic bulge by fitting to spatial distributions of the Gaia DR2 disk velocity, VVV proper motion, BRAVA radial velocity, OGLE-III red clump star count, and OGLE-IV star count and…
We analyse the effects on the predictions for the microlensing searches toward the Galactic bulge coming from the fact that not all the stars monitored belong to the bulge itself, but that a non--negligible fraction of them actually are in…
The Galactic bulge and bar are critical to our understanding of the Milky Way. However, due to the lack of reliable stellar distances, the structure and kinematics of the bulge/bar beyond the Galactic center have remained largely…
We report on our search for microlensing towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Analysis of 5.7 years of photometry on 11.9 million stars in the LMC reveals 13 - 17 microlensing events. This is significantly more than the $\sim$ 2 to 4…
OGLE III and MOA II are discovering 600-1000 Galactic Bulge microlens events each year. This stretches the resources available for intensive follow-up monitoring of the lightcurves in search of anomalies caused by planets near the lens…
The EROS-2 collaboration has conducted a survey of the Magellanic Clouds between July 1996 and February 2003 (6.7 years), in order to search for microlensing phenomena due to putative machos (massive astronomical compact halo objects).…
Recently Sahu et al., using the Hubble Space Telescope to monitor stars in the direction of the old globular cluster M22, detected six events in which otherwise constant stars brightened by ~50% during a time of <1 day. They tentatively…
We search for microlensing events in fields along the Galactic minor axis, ranging from the Galactic center to -3.7<b< 3.9 deg., using the VVV survey near-IR photometry. The new search is made across VVV tiles b291, b305, b319, b347, b361…
Zaritsky and Lin have recently suggested that the color magnitude diagram of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) contains evidence of foreground red clump stars. They interpret this as evidence of tidal debris or a dwarf galaxy at a distance…
We present the PLANET photometric data set for \ob14, a high magnification ($A_{\rm max}\sim 16$) event alerted by the OGLE collaboration toward the Galactic bulge in 1998. The PLANET data set consists a total of 461 I-band and 139 $V-$band…
The MACHO collaboration has recently analyzed 2.1 years of photometric data for about 8.5 million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This analysis has revealed 8 candidate microlensing events and a total microlensing optical depth…
Optical integrated spectra of bulges have been obtained for 28 spiral galaxies. By applying an appropriate aperture size for each galaxy, the unavoidable contamination of disk starlight has been carefully minimized and set to $\sim$ 1/7 of…
Surface brightness maps at 12 microns, derived from observations with the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), are used to estimate the integrated flux at this wavelength from the Galactic bulge as a function of galactic latitude along…
Euclid, which is primarily a dark-energy/cosmology mission, may have a microlensing component, consisting of perhaps four dedicated one-month campaigns aimed at the Galactic bulge. We show that such a program would yield excellent…
Microlensing is the only known direct method to measure the masses of stars that lack visible companions. In terms of microlensing observables, the mass is given by M=(c^2/4G)\tilde r_E \theta_E and so requires the measurement of both the…
The gravitational microlensing technique allows the discovery of exoplanets around stars distributed in the disk of the galaxy towards the bulge. However, the alignment of two stars that led to the discovery is unique over the timescale of…