Related papers: Gravitational Microlensing Results from Macho
The nature of the Massive Compact Halo objects seen in microlensing experiments and interpreted as dark matter in the Halo of our Galaxy remains a mystery. Arguments are presented that these events are probably not ordinary stellar or…
Microlensing results towards the LMC strongly depend on the properties of both the luminous and the dark matter distribution in the Galaxy. The two main sources of uncertainty come from the poor knowledge of the rotation curve at large…
Cosmological nucleosynthesis calculations imply that many of the baryons in the Universe must be dark. We discuss the likelihood that some of these dark baryons may reside in galaxies as Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs), the remnants…
If compact baryonic objects contribute significantly to the dark matter in our Galaxy, their mass function will present vital clues for galaxy formation theories and star formation processes in the early Universe. Here we discuss what one…
We present a catalog of 450 high signal-to-noise microlensing events observed by the MACHO collaboration between 1993 and 1999. The events are distributed throughout our fields and, as expected, they show clear concentration toward the…
Compact dark matter has been efficiently constrained in the M <~ 10 M_sun mass range by null searches for microlensing of stars in nearby galaxies. Here we propose to probe the mass range M >~ 10 M_sun by seeking echoes in gamma-ray-burst…
The gravitational microlensing experiments in the direction of Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) predict a large amount of white dwarfs ($\sim 20%$) filling the galactic halo. However, the predicted white dwarfs have not been observed at the…
We study different models of dark matter distribution for the halo of our galaxy. In particular, we consider Eddington and King-Michie models, which [C[C, which include anisotropy in the velocity space, and compute in a self-consistent way…
A simple interpretation of the more than dozen microlensing events seen in the direction of the LMC is a halo population of MACHOs which accounts for about half of the mass of the Galaxy. Such an interpretation is not without its problems,…
The historical microlensing surveys MACHO, EROS, MOA and OGLE (hereafter summarized in the MEMO acronym) have searched for microlensing toward the LMC for a total duration of 27 years. We have studied the potential of joining all databases…
A new type of gravitational microlensing experiment toward a field where stars are not resolved is being developed observationally and theoretically: pixel lensing. When the experiment is carried out toward the M31 bulge area, events may be…
Many high velocity HI clouds (HVCs) are now believed to be scattered throughout the Galactic halo on scales of tens of kiloparsecs. Some of these clouds appear to contain substantial HI masses (>10^6 Msun). It has been suggested that these…
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…
Much interest has been generated recently by the ongoing MACHO, EROS and OGLE projects to identify gravitationally lensed stars from the Large Magellanic Cloud and Galactic bulge, and the positive identification of several events (Alcock et…
We propose the existence of ultracompact minihalos as a new type of massive compact halo object (MACHO) and suggest an observational test to discover them. These new MACHOs are a powerful probe into the nature of dark matter and physics in…
We report the first discovery of a gravitational microlensing candidate towards a new population of source stars, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The candidate event's light curve shows no variation for 3 years before an upward excursion…
The EROS microlensing survey has monitored nearly 100 million stars for seven years, to search for halo brown dwarfs and compact objects in the Galactic disk. In this paper, we review the various EROS observation programs and the…
Gravitational lensing has now become a popular tool to measure the mass distribution of structures in the Universe on various scales. Here we focus on the study of galaxy's scale dark matter halos with galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques:…
The amount of dark matter in the solar neighbourhood is a poorly constrained quantity which is nevertheless used to normalise the properties of the dark halo. While the current surveys towards the LMC, SMC and the Galactic bulge probe the…
By monitoring $10^6$ quasars one could search for lensing by stars and Massive Compact Halo Objects (Machos) out to redshifts $z\sim 4$. If Machos have a present cosmological density $\Omega_{L,0}=1\%$, then the expected event rate is…