Related papers: Is the galactic halo baryonic?
We have searched for long duration microlensing events originating from intermediate mass Black Holes (BH) in the halo of the Milky Way, using archival data from EROS-2 and MACHO photometric surveys towards the Large Magellanic Cloud. We…
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…
Gravitational microlensing has been employed to identify massive halo objects by their amplification of distant sources; MACHO searches have studied event times $2 h \lesssim t_0 \lesssim 2 y$ corresponding masses in the range $10^{-6}…
The microlensing experiments in the direction of the LMC seem to be indicating that about 60% of the dark matter in the Galactic halo is tied up in objects whose masses are about half the mass of the Sun. This mass is a natural one for old…
(Short version) The nature and the location of the lenses discovered in the microlensing surveys done so far towards the LMC remain unclear. This contribution is comprised of two distinct parts. In the first part, motivated by these…
If the dark halo matter is primarily composed of MACHOs toward the lower end of the possible detection range ($ < 10^{-3}$ $M_{\odot}$) a fraction of the lens detection events should involve the lens crossing directly in front of the disk…
We carry on a new analysis of the sample of MACHO microlensing candidates towards the LMC. Our main purpose is to determine the lens population to which the events may belong. We give particular emphasis to the possibility of characterizing…
The microlensing surveys MACHO, EROS, MOA and OGLE (hereafter called MEMO) have searched for microlensing toward the Large Magellanic Cloud for a cumulated duration of 27 years. We study the potential of joining these databases to search…
In order to understand how molecular clouds form in the Galactic interstellar medium, we would like to be able to map the structure and kinematics of the gas flows responsible for forming them. However, doing so is observationally…
The recent suggestion that the microlensing events observed towards the Large Magellanic Cloud are due to an intervening Sgr-like dwarf galaxy is examined. A search for foreground RR Lyrae in the MACHO photometry database yields 20 stars…
Most of the mass density in the Universe---and in the halo of our own galaxy---exists in the form of dark matter. Overall, the contribution of luminous matter (in stars) to the mass density of the Universe is less than 1\%; primordial…
Clusters of galaxies are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe, containing about 10^15 solar masses of hot (10^8 K) gas, galaxies and dark matter in a typical volume of about 10 Mpc^3. Magnetic fields and relativistic…
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…
There are lines of evidence suggesting that some of the observed microlensing events in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) are caused by ordinary star lenses as opposed to dark Machos in the Galactic halo. Efficient lensing…
A population of molecular clouds with a significantly greater scale height than that of Giant Molecular Clouds has been identified by examining maps of the latitude distribution of the $^{12}CO(1-0)$ emission in the first quadrant of the…
We present an analysis of the results of the OGLE-III microlensing campaign towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We evaluate for all the possible lens populations along the line of sight the expected microlensing quantities, number of…
The EROS and MACHO collaborations have each published upper limits on the amount of planetary mass dark matter in the Galactic Halo obtained from gravitational microlensing searches. In this paper the two limits are combined to give a much…
Microlensing surveys search for the transient brightening of a background star that is the signature of gravitational lensing by a foreground compact object. This technique is an elegant way to search for astrophysical candidates that might…
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…
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 the discs or halos of galaxies. If they were in the form of…