Related papers: A Spectroscopic Method to Measure Macho Proper Mot…
If the dark halo of our galaxy is made of compact objects as massive as M = 10^6 solar masses, their detection by means of ordinary microlensing searches would take a very long time as the characteristic time scale of such a lensing event,…
Recently obtained kinematic data has shown that the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) possesses an old stellar halo. In order to further characterize the properties of this halo, parametric King models are fit to the surface density of RR Lyrae…
The gravitational interaction between the Milky Way (MW) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) perturbs the MW halo's density and kinematics, encoding information about both galaxies' masses and structures. We present a suite of 2,848…
We present the first detailed assessment of the large-scale rotation of any galaxy based on full three-dimensional velocity measurements. We do this for the LMC by combining our HST average proper motion (PM) measurements for stars in 22…
We present a Catalog of high proper motion (HPM) stars detected in the foreground of central parts of the Magellanic Clouds. The Catalog contains 2161 objects in the 4.5 square degree area towards the LMC, and 892 HPM stars in the 2.4…
Caustic crossing microlensing events provide us a unique opportunity to measure the relative proper motion of the lens to the source, and so those caused by binary MACHOs are of great importance for understanding the structure of the…
Due to dramatic improvements in the precision of astrometric measurements, the observation of light centroid shifts in observed stars due to intervening massive compact objects (`astrometric microlensing') will become possible in the near…
Context. Astrometric gravitational microlensing can be used to determine the mass of a single star (the lens) with an accuracy of a few percent. To do so, precise measurements of the angular separations between lens and background star with…
The POINT-AGAPE collaboration is carrying out a search for gravitational microlensing toward M31 to reveal galactic dark matter in the form of MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) in the halos of the Milky Way and M31. A…
More than a dozen microlensing events have been detected so far towards the LMC and 2 towards the SMC. If all the lenses are in the Galactic halo, both the LMC and the SMC events are expected to have similar time scales. However, the first…
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 conduct gravitational microlensing experiments in a galaxy taken from a cosmological N-body simulation. Hypothetical observers measure the optical depth and event rate toward hypothetical LMCs and compare their results with model…
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 infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is predicted to displace the inner Milky Way (MW), imprinting an apparent 'reflex motion' on the observed velocities of distant halo stars. We construct the largest all-sky spectroscopic…
The MACHO Project monitors millions of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Small Magellanic Cloud and the bulge of the Milky Way searching for the gravitational microlensing signature of baryonic dark matter. This Project has yielded…
Aims: for the first time the astrometric capabilities of the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) facility GeMS with the GSAOI camera on Gemini-South are tested to quantify the accuracy in determining stellar proper motions in the…
We analyze the lightcurve of the microlensing event OGLE-2003-BLG-175/MOA-2003-BLG-45 and show that it has two properties that, when combined with future high resolution astrometry, could lead to a direct, accurate measurement of the lens…
Recent observational studies using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have derived the center-of-mass proper motion (CMPM) of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Although these studies carefully treated both rotation and perspective effects in…
We have measured the proper motion of the Draco dwarf galaxy using images at two epochs with a time baseline of about two years taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Wide Field Channel 1 and 2 provide…
Increasing evidences suggest that the Galactic halo is lumpy on kpc scales due to the accretion of at least a dozen small galaxies (LMC/SMC, Sgr, Fornax etc.). Faint stars in such lumpy structures can significant microlense a background…