Related papers: EROS: a Galactic Microlensing Odyssey
The 2-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) (Skrutskie et al. 1997) and the DEep Near Infrared Survey of the southern sky (DENIS) (Epchtein et al. 1997) have revealed a heretofore unknown population of free brown dwarfs that has extended the local…
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.…
Foundations of standard theory of microlensing are described, namely we consider microlensing stars in Galactic bulge, the Magellanic Clouds or other nearby galaxies. We suppose that gravitational microlenses lie between an Earth observer…
Microlensing results towards the LMC strongly depend on the properties of both the luminous and the dark matter distribution in the Galaxy. The two main sources of uncertainty come from the poor knowledge of the rotation curve at large…
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…
A substantial fraction the stellar mass attributed to galaxies is invisible: stars close to the hydrogen burning limit, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. These constituents do, however, gravitationally micro-lens…
We use extensive gravity-sensitive DDO 51 photometry over 5100 square degrees, combined with SDSS broadband photometry, to select a catalog of $\sim 4,000$ giant stars covering a large fraction of the high Galactic latitude sky and reaching…
The observations of microlensing events in the Large Magellanic Cloud suggest that a sizable fraction (\sim 50%) of the galactic halo is in the form of MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) with an average mass $\sim 0.27…
I review results from, and future prospects for, microlensing searches for extrasolar planets. Analyses of well-sampled microlensing light curves by several collaborations have demonstrated that current searches are sensitive to…
The discoveries of 17 microlensing event candidates have been reported over the last year by three teams conducting unprecedented mass photometric searches in the direction of the Galactic bulge and the Magellanic Clouds. These include 10…
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 $10^{-6}<M/M_\odot<10^{-1}$.…
We present a catalog of 450 high signal-to-noise microlensing events observed by the MACHO collaboration between 1993 and 1999. The events are distributed throughout our fields and, as expected, they show clear concentration toward the…
We describe a few recent microlensing results from the MACHO Collaboration. The aim of the MACHO Project was the identification and quantitative description of dark and luminous matter in the Milky Way using microlensing toward the…
Stellar halos are the only major stellar component of disk galaxies that lack systematic observational characterization, yet they encode critical information about galaxy merger histories. We present the first systematic census of stellar…
We describe the motivation, field locations and stellar selection for the ARGOS spectroscopic survey of 28,000 stars in the bulge and inner disk of the Milky Way galaxy across latitudes of b = -5 deg to -10 deg. The primary goal of this…
Using conditional luminosity functions (CLFs) which encode the luminosity distribution of galaxies as a function of halo mass, we construct a halo model of IRAS galaxies selected at 60 micron. An abundance matching technique is used to link…
Recent observations of microlensing events in the Large Magellanic Cloud suggest that a sizable fraction of the galactic halo is in the form of Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs). Although the average MACHO mass is…
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…
In a recent series of three papers, Belokurov, Evans, and Le Du, and Evans and Belokurov, reanalysed the MACHO collaboration data and gave alternative sets of microlensing events and an alternative optical depth to microlensing toward the…
Wide angle and deep surveys, regardless of their primary purpose, always sample a large number of stars in the Galaxy and in its satellite system. We here make a forecast of the expected stellar sample resulting from the Dark Energy Survey…