Related papers: Microlens Mass Functions
Although a decade of microlensing searches towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) has detected 13-25 possible microlensing events, the nature and the location of the lenses, being either halo machos or LMC stars, remains a subject of…
The only microlensing events towards the Magellanic Clouds for which the location of the lens is strongly constrained are the two binary caustic crossing events. In at least one and possibly both cases, the lens lies at, or close to, the…
The detection of microlensing has opened the way for the development of new methods in galactic astronomy. This series of papers investigates what microlensing can teach us about the structure and shape of the dark halo. In this paper we…
Microlensing searches aim to detect compact halo dark matter via its gravitational lensing effect on stars within the Large Magellanic Cloud. The most recent results have led to the claim that roughly one fifth of the galactic halo dark…
The French collaboration EROS and the American-Australian collaboration MACHO have reported the observation of altogether $\sim$ 10 microlensing events by monitoring during several years the brightness of millions of stars in the Large…
We calculate the optical depth and the number of events due to gravitational microlensing towards the Galactic bulge, the spiral arm directions $\gamma$ Scutum, $\beta$ Scutum, $\gamma$ Normae, $\vartheta$ Muscae and some dwarf galaxies in…
It has been suggested that a monitoring program employing the pixel lensing method to search for microlensing events towards galactic globular clusters may increase the statistics and discriminate among different halo models. Stimulated by…
We build a stellar-dynamical model of the Milky Way barred bulge and disk, using a newly implemented adaptive particle method. The underlying mass model has been previously shown to match the Galactic near-infrared surface brightness as…
Aims. We study the impact of the parallax on the search for very long timescale microlensing events towards the Magellanic Clouds due to dark massive compact objects within the past MACHO and EROS, the ongoing MOA and OGLE, and the future…
The first investigations of the response of the microlensing magnification pattern (at an optical depth of order unity) to the mass function of the microlenses found that the resulting statistics depend only on the mean microlens mass <m>.…
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…
Microlensing has established itself as a powerful new method for the detection of baryonic dark matter in the Galaxy. The theory of microlensing is sketched and its similarity with the optical effect of twinkling is explained. The bulk of…
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…
Measurements of the microlensing optical depth and event rate toward the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) can be used to probe the distribution and mass function of compact objects in the direction toward that galaxy - in the Milky Way disk,…
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…
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…
The expected microlensing events of the LMC by the MACHOs of the LMC itself are calculated and compared with analogue events by objects in the Galactic halo. The LMC matter distribution is modelled by a spherical halo and an exponential…
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…
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…
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…