Related papers: Optical Depths and Timescale Distributions in Gala…
We examine the left-right asymmetry in the cleaned COBE/DIRBE near-infrared data of the inner Galaxy and show (i) that the Galactic bar is probably not seen very nearly end-on, and (ii) that even if it is, it is not highly elongated. The…
We examine the most recent observational constraints arising from i) small-scale and large-scale Galactic dynamical properties, ii) star counts at faint magnitude and iii) microlensing experiments. From these constraints, we determine the…
A self-consistent stellar dynamical model for the Galactic bar is constructed from about 500 numerically computed orbits with an extension of the Schwarzschild technique. The model fits the {\sl COBE} found asymmetric boxy light…
Recently, from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images of one of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) events taken 6.3 years after the original lensing measurement, Alcock et al. were able to directly image the lens. Although the first resolved…
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…
In the framework of microlensing searches towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), we discuss the results presented by the OGLE collaboration for their OGLE-II campaign \citep{lukas09}. We evaluate the optical depth, the duration and the…
Optical depths of dense molecular gas are commonly used in Galactic and extragalactic studies to constrain the dense gas mass of the clouds or galaxies. The optical depths are often obtained based on spatially unresolved data, especially in…
The MACHO project is searching for dark matter in the form of massive compact halo objects (Machos), by monitoring the brightness of millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds to search for gravitational microlensing events. Analysis of our…
It is widely believed that dark matter halos are flattened, that is closer to oblate than prolate. The evidence cited is based largely on observations of galaxies which do not look anything like our own and on numerical simulations which…
We report the result of the analysis of the light curve of a caustic-crossing binary-lens microlensing event OGLE-2009-BLG-023/MOA-2009-BLG-028. Even though the event was observed solely by survey experiments, we could uniquely determine…
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 present the analysis of the event OGLE-2017-BLG-1186 from the 2017 Spitzer microlensing campaign. This is a remarkable microlensing event because its source is photometrically bright and variable, which makes it possible to perform an…
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…
The EROS-2 project has been designed to search for microlensing events towards any dense stellar field. The densest parts of the Galactic spiral arms have been monitored to maximize the microlensing signal expected from the stars of the…
Recent determination of the outer rotation curve of the Galaxy suggests that the total Galactic mass is likely to concentrate into a region of radius $\sim2R_0$. If this finding is correct, the previously estimated optical depth of…
For a given spatial distribution of the lenses and distribution of the transverse velocity of the lens relative to the line-of-sight, a probability distribution for the lens mass for a single observed event is derived. In addition, similar…
We present the VI photometric maps of the Galactic bulge. They contain VI photometry and astrometry of about 30 million stars from 49 fields of 0.225 square degree each in the Galactic center region. The data were collected during the…
Microlensing events are usually selected among single-peaked non-repeating light curves in order to avoid confusion with variable stars. However, a microlensing event may exhibit a second microlensing brightening episode when the source…
In this article, we have investigated the possibility to distinguish between different galactic models through the microlensing parallax studies. We show that a systematic search for parallax effects can be done using the currently running…
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…