Related papers: Pixel lensing observations towards globular cluste…
It has been proposed that the Galaxy might contain a population of cold clouds in numbers sufficient to account for a substantial fraction of the total mass of the Galaxy. These clouds would have masses of the order of 10^{-3} Solar mass…
We investigate the dark halo lens mass function (MF) for a wide class of spheroidal non singular isothermal models comparing observed and observable microlensing quantities for MACHO observations towards LMC and taking into account the…
Weak gravitational lensing has been used extensively in the past decade to constrain the masses of galaxy clusters, and is the most promising observational technique for providing the mass calibration necessary for precision cosmology with…
We estimate the rate of gravitational microlensing events of cluster stars due to black holes (BHs) in the globular cluster NGC 5139 ($\omega Cen$). Theory and observations both indicate that $\omega Cen$ may contain thousands of BHs, but…
The spatial distribution of compact dark matter in our Galaxy can be determined in a few years of monitoring Galactic globular clusters for microlensing. Globular clusters are the only dense fields of stars distributed throughout the…
The simplest interpretation of the microlensing events observed towards the Large Magellanic Clouds is that approximately half of the mass of the Milky Way halo is in the form of MAssive Compact Halo Objects with $M \sim 0.5 M_{\odot}$. It…
Measuring the distribution of mass on galaxy cluster scales is a crucial test of the Lambda CDM model, providing constraints on the nature of dark matter. Recent work investigating mass distributions of individual galaxy clusters using…
The distortion of the images of faint high-redshift galaxies can be used to probe the intervening mass distribution. This weak gravitational lensing effect has been used recently to study the (projected) mass distribution of several…
Analysing the weak lensing distortions of the images of faint background galaxies provides a means to constrain the mass distribution of cluster galaxies and potentially to test the extent of their dark matter halos as a function of the…
Gravitational lensing has now become a popular tool to measure the mass distribution of structures in the Universe on various scales. Here we focus on the study of galaxy's scale dark matter halos with galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques:…
We study the possibility to detect extrasolar planets in M31 through pixel-lensing observations. Using a Monte Carlo approach, we select the physical parameters of the binary lens system, a star hosting a planet, and we calculate the…
A coherent over- or under-density contrast across a finite survey volume causes an upward- or downward-fluctuation in the observed number of halos. This fluctuation in halo number adds a significant co-variant scatter in the observed…
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 $10^{-6} < M/M_{\odot} < 10^{-1}$.…
It has been proposed that the MACHOs in our galaxy could be clumped in globular cluster--like associations or RAMBOs (robust associations of massive baryonic objects) (Moore \& Silk 1995). Here we investigate the effect such clustering has…
In this paper we explore a quantitative and efficient method to constrain the halo properties of distant galaxy populations through ``galaxy--galaxy" lensing and show that the mean masses and sizes of halos can be estimated accurately,…
Recent surveys monitoring millions of light curves of resolved stars in the LMC have discovered several microlensing events. Unresolved stars could however significantly contribute to the microlensing rate towards the LMC. Monitoring…
We study the use of parallax microlensing to separate the effects of the mass function of dark massive halo objects (MHOs or `machos') on the one hand and their spatial distribution and kinematics on the other. This disentanglement is…
We aim at investigating potential biases in lensing and X-ray methods to measure the cluster mass profiles. We do so by performing realistic simulations of lensing and X-ray observations that are subsequently analyzed using observational…
The properties of clusters of galaxies offer key insights into the assembly process of structure in the universe. Numerical simulations of cosmic structure formation in a hierarchical, dark matter dominated universe suggest that galaxy…
Assembly bias, which is the variation in halo clustering at fixed mass driven by formation history, has long been predicted by numerical simulations but remains difficult to confirm observationally. Previous studies have reported evidence…