Related papers: Microlensing towards the LMC
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…
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…
High-resolution N-body simulations of dark matter halos indicate that the Milky Way contains numerous subhalos. When a dark matter subhalo passes in front of a star, the light from that star will be deflected by gravitational lensing,…
We discuss whether the Gaussian is a reasonable approximation of the velocity distribution of stellar systems that are not spherically distributed. By using a non-Gaussian velocity distribution to describe the sources in the Large…
We investigate the possibility of determining whether microlensing objects towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) are in a Galactic thick disc, or are in a Galactic halo, by using parallax measurements with an Earth-radius scale baseline.…
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 present the analysis of the first two years of a search for microlensing of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud with the EROS (Exp\'erience de Recherche d'Objets Sombres) project. A single event is detected, already present in the first…
Recent results of the SLOTT-AGAPE and POINT-AGAPE collaborations on a search for microlensing events in direction of the Andromeda galaxy, by using the pixel method, are reported. The detection of 4 microlensing events, some likely to be…
The evolution of the observational results of microlensing towards the LMC and some of the suggested interpretations to account for them are discussed. It is emphasized that the results at present are indicative of a lensing population of…
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…
One of the major limitations of microlensing observations toward the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the low rate of event detection. What can be done to improve this rate? Is it better to invest telescope time in more frequent observations…
Gravitational microlensing is a robust tool to detect and directly measure the abundance and mass of any kind of compact objects, either in our galaxy or in the extragalatic domain. On basis to generic, broadly applicable arguments, it is…
The motivation for this paper is to review the limits set on the MACHO content of the Galactic halo by microlensing experiments in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud. This has been prompted by recent measurements of the Galactic…
Zaritsky & Lin have claimed detection of an intervening population of stars toward the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) which, they believe, could account for a substantial fraction of the observed microlensing events. I show that the observed…
We detail how microlensing internal to M31 could be used to test whether a large fraction of the matter in spiral galaxy haloes is composed of dark objects with masses comparable to those of stars, and in the process show how the…
The dependence of microlensing time scale frequency distributions and optical depth toward the galactic center on galactic model parameters is explored in detail for a distribution of stars consisting of the Zhao (1996) bar and nucleus and…
The failure to find evidence for elementary particles that could serve as the constituents of dark matter brings to mind suggestions that dark matter might consist of massive compact objects (MACHOs). In particular, it has recently been…
I review recent results from gravitational microlensing surveys of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The combined microlensing optical depth of the MACHO and EROS-1 surveys is tau_LMC = 2.1{+1.3/-0.8}* 10^{-7} which is substantially larger than…
The nature of the several microlensing events observed by the MACHO team towards the LMC still remains controversial. Low-mass substellar objects and stars with masses larger than ~1 M_{sun} have been ruled out as major components of a…
We present Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFPC2 photometry of 13 microlensed source stars from the 5.7 year Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) survey conducted by the MACHO Project. The microlensing source stars are identified by deriving accurate…