Related papers: Dark Matter -- Personal View
OGLE and other projects are likely to discover first stellar mass black holes and the first planets through gravitational lensing in the next year or two. It is important to have follow-up projects ready, using diverse observing methods.…
The observations of microlensing events in the Large Magellanic Cloud suggest that a sizable fraction ($\sim$ 50%) of the galactic halo is in the form of MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) with an average mass $\sim 0.27…
Next-generation ground-based gravitational-wave (GW) detectors are expected to detect millions of binary black hole mergers during their operation period. A small fraction ($\sim 0.1 - 1\%$) of them will be strongly lensed by intervening…
How is mass distributed in the Universe? How does it compare with the distribution of light and stars? We address these questions by examining the distribution of mass, determined from weak lensing observations, and starlight, around…
It is now, generally, believed that the presence of some form of dark matter is essential to explain the flat rotation curves of galaxies, and anomalous large velocities of galaxies in the clusters and superclusters. This dark matter turns…
One of the possible explanations for dark matter is that of compact dark objects of baryonic origin, such as black holes or even planets. Accumulating evidence, including the discovery of merging stellar mass black holes through…
Gravitational microlensing is known for baryoninc dark matter searches. Here we show that microlensing also provides a unique tool for the detection of low mass planets (such as earths and neptunes) from the ground. A planetary system forms…
This paper reviews statistical methods recently developed to reconstruct and analyze dark matter mass maps from weak lensing observations. The field of weak lensing is motivated by the observations made in the last decades showing that the…
A particular open problem in cosmology is whether dark matter on small scales is clumpy, forming gravitationally-bound halos distributed within the Galaxy. The practical difficulties inherent in testing this hypothesis stem from the fact…
We propose a new technique to directly measure the shapes of dark matter halos of galaxies using weak gravitational lensing. Extending the standard galaxy-galaxy lensing method, we show that the shape parameters of the mass distribution of…
Direct evidence for the existence of dark matter and measurements of its interaction cross-section have been provided by the physical offset between dark matter and intra- cluster gas in merging systems like the Bullet Cluster. Although a…
We discuss the implications of the more than 50 microlensing events seen by the EROS, MACHO, and OGLE collaborations for the composition of the halo of our galaxy. The event rates indicate that the halo mass fraction in MACHO's is less than…
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…
If cluster dark matter is in the form of compact objects it will introduce fluctuations into the light curves of distant sources. Current searches for MACHOs in clusters of galaxies focus on monitoring quasars behind nearby systems. This…
We explore the mass distribution of material associated with galaxies from the observation of gravitational weak lensing for the galaxy mass correlation function with the aid of $N$-body simulations of dark matter. The latter is employed to…
The nature of the dark matter in the halo of our Galaxy is still largely unknown. The microlensing events found so far towards the Large Magellanic Cloud suggest that at most about 20% of the halo dark matter is in the form of MACHOs…
If a significant fraction of dark matter is in the form of compact objects, they will cause microlensing effects in the gravitational wave (GW) signals observable by LIGO and Virgo. From the non-observation of microlensing signatures in the…
In the cold dark matter scenario, dark matter halos are assembled hierarchically from smaller subunits. Some of these subunits are disrupted during the merging process, whereas others survive temporarily in the form of subhalos. A…
In this review I will describe progress that has been made in determining masses of galaxy clusters using `weak lensing' and how this technique my be applied in the future to determine the dark matter distribution both on supercluster…
Results are presented from the MACHO collaboration gravitational microlensing search. The experiment and the nearly 50 microlensing events that have been detected are described. Limits on the baryonic content of the halo are given, as are…