Related papers: Photometric Confirmation of MACHO Large Magellanic…
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…
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…
After a decade of gravitational microlensing experiments, a dozen of microlensing candidates in the direction of the stars of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) have been detected by the EROS and MACHO groups. Recently it was shown that the…
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…
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…
The MACHO project is a search for dark matter in the form of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). The project has photometrically monitored tens of millions of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and…
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…
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…
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 compute the optical depth and particularly the number of expected events for…
In recent years various models for the Galactic distribution of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) have been proposed for the interpretation of microlensing toward the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). A direct way to fit the best model is…
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…
We present the results from the OGLE-II survey (1996-2000) towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which has the aim of detecting the microlensing phenomena caused by dark matter compact objects in the Galactic Halo (Machos). We use high…
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…
After a decade of gravitational microlensing experiments, 13 to 17 events by MACHO (depending on quality) and two events by EROS have been detected. All of those have been observed in the direction of Large Magellanic Cloud. We use Evans…
Characterizing the nature and spatial distribution of the lensing objects that produce the previously measured microlensing optical depth toward the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) remains an open problem. We present an appraisal of the…
We present a new analysis on the issue of the location of the observed microlensing events in direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This is carried out starting from a recently drawn coherent picture of the geometrical structure…
Massive Compact objects in the halo, known as MACHOs, have been postulated as the origin of a substantial fraction of `dark matter' known to exist in the haloes of galaxies$^{1,2}$. Paczy\'nski$^3$ has suggested that it might possible to…
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…
In the third part of the series presenting the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) microlensing studies of the dark matter halo compact objects (MACHOs) we describe results of the OGLE-III monitoring of the Large Magellanic…
We present a new analysis of the results of the EROS-2, OGLE-II, and OGLE-III microlensing campaigns towards the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Through a statistical analysis we address the issue of the \emph{nature} of the reported…