Related papers: Probable Gravitational Microlensing towards the Ga…
Some previous studies have suggested that massive and intermediate-mass primordial black holes (PBHs) could comprise a substantial fraction of dark matter in the Universe. Such black holes, if they existed in the Milky Way halo, would give…
Since the first discovery of microlensing events nearly two decades ago, gravitational microlensing has accumulated tens of TBytes of data and developed into a powerful astrophysical technique with diverse applications. The review starts…
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…
We study a sample of 16 microlensed Galactic bulge main sequence turnoff region stars for which high dispersion spectra have been obtained with detailed abundance analyses. We demonstrate that there is a very strong and highly statistically…
Disk-halo models of the Galaxy and LMC are constructed and used to analyse the microlensing data-set. Deflectors in the LMC bar, disk and halo provide an optical depth to microlensing of $\sim 2 \times 10^{-7}$. Deflectors in the Galactic…
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…
Extreme microlensing events, defined as events with maximum magnification $A_\max\gsim 200$ are a potentially powerful probe of the mass spectrum and spatial distribution of objects along lines of sight toward the Galactic bulge. About 75…
Astrophysical implications of gravitational microlensing of gravitational waves emitted by rotating neutron stars (NSs) are investigated. In particular, attention is focused on the following situations: i) NSs in the galactic bulge lensed…
The observed microlensing events towards the LMC do not have yet a coherent explanation. If they are due to Galactic Halo objects, the nature of these objects is puzzling --- half the halo in dark 0.5 Msol objects. On the other hand,…
We present a measurement of the microlensing optical depth toward the Galactic Bulge based on 4 years of the OGLE-II survey using Red Clump Giant (RCG). Using 32 events we find tau=2.55_{-0.46}^{+0.57}* 10^{-6} at (l,b)=(1.16, -2.75).…
(Abridged) A close scrutiny of the microlensing results towards the Magellanic clouds reveals that the stars within the Magellanic clouds are major contributors as lenses, and the contribution of MACHOs to dark matter is 0 to 5%. The…
The MACHO experiment is searching for dark matter in the halo of the Galaxy by monitoring more than 20 million stars in the LMC and Galactic bulge for gravitational microlensing events. The hardware consists of a 50 inch telescope, a…
Microlensing is the tool of choice for the search and the analysis of compact halo objects ("MACHOs"), a still viable class of dark matter candidates at the galactic scale. Different analyses point towards an agreement in excluding dark…
I propose a radical revision in the search strategy for Massive Compact Objects (Machos) toward the Galactic bulge: monitor the entire $\sim 300$ square deg of the bulge and tune the search primarily to microlensing events of bright…
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…
The dependence of microlensing time scale frequency distributions and optical depth toward the galactic center on galactic model parameters is explored in detail for a distribution of stars consisting of the Zhao (1996) bar and nucleus and…
The recently reported microlensing events of the LMC have caused much excitement, and have been interpreted as due to `dark objects' (MACHOs) in the halo of our Galaxy. It is shown here that the stars within the LMC play a dominant role as…
We present analysis of MACHO Alert 95-30, a dramatic gravitational microlensing event towards the Galactic bulge whose peak magnification departs significantly from the standard point-source microlensing model. Alert 95-30 was observed in…
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…
We discuss the potential of the gravitational microlensing method as a unique tool to detect unambiguous signals caused by intermediate-mass black holes in globular clusters. We select clusters near the line of sight to the Galactic Bulge…