Related papers: Theory of Pixel Lensing
It has been suggested that a monitoring program employing the pixel lensing method to search for microlensing events towards galactic globular clusters may increase the statistics and discriminate among different halo models. Stimulated by…
We describe a new method to search for gravitational microlensing toward the Galactic bulge that employs a small camera rather than a conventional telescope and probes new regions of parameter space. The small aperture (~65 mm) permits…
Pixel lensing is the gravitational microlensing of light from unresolved stars contributing to the luminosity flux collected by a single pixel. A star must be sufficiently magnified, that is, the lens impact parameter must be less than a…
Recent surveys monitoring millions of light curves of resolved stars in the LMC have discovered several microlensing events. Unresolved stars could however significantly contribute to the microlensing rate towards the LMC. Monitoring…
Pixel lensing is gravitational microlensing of unresolved stars. The main target explored up to now has been the nearby galaxy of Andromeda, M31. The scientific issues of interest are the search for dark matter in form of compact halo…
Weak gravitational lensing is a promising probe of dark matter and dark energy requiring accurate measurement of the shapes of faint, distant galaxies. Such measures are hindered by the finite resolution and pixel scale of typical cameras.…
Traditional approaches to measuring the stellar mass function (MF) are fundamentally limited because objects are detected based on their luminosity, not their mass. These methods are thereby restricted to luminous and relatively nearby…
It has been shown that a flux--weighted full width at half maximum timescale of a microlensing event can be used in an unbiased estimator of the optical depth. For the first time, this allows a physical parameter to be easily estimated from…
Pixel microlensing, i.e. gravitational microlensing of unresolved stars, can be used to explore distant stellar systems, and as a bonus may be able to detect extragalactic planets. In these studies, binary-lens events with multiple…
Gould & DePoy proposed a pixel lensing survey towards the Galactic bulge using a small aperture (~65 mm) camera with a large pixel size (10") detector and deliberately degraded optics achieving 30" PSF. In this paper, we estimate the event…
The robust estimation of the tiny distortions (shears) of galaxy shapes caused by weak gravitational lensing in the presence of much larger shape distortions due to the point-spread function (PSF) has been widely investigated. One major…
Pixel lensing is a technique for searching baryonic components of dark matter, (MACHOs), in any part of galaxies. This method is very efficient, since it avoids to resolve each source star and so it has the advantage to provide an high…
I demonstrate that one can detect pixel gravitational microlensing events at the rate $\sim 180\ {\rm events}\ {\rm yr}^{-1}$ and that some fraction of events ($\sim 15$) will be good enough to measure time scales at the $20\%$ level if the…
Weak-lensing shear estimates show a troublesome dependence on the apparent brightness of the galaxies used to measure the ellipticity: In several studies, the amplitude of the inferred shear falls sharply with decreasing source…
We present a comprehensive treatment of the pixel-lensing theory and apply it to lensing experiments and their results toward M31. Using distribution functions for the distances, velocities, masses, and luminosities of stars, we derive…
We study the possibility to detect extrasolar planets in M31 through pixel-lensing observations. Using a Monte Carlo approach, we select the physical parameters of the binary lens system, a star hosting a planet, and we calculate the…
Highly precise weak lensing shear measurement is required for statistical weak gravitational lensing analysis such as cosmic shear measurement to achieve severe constrain on the cosmological parameters. For this purpose any systematic error…
Weak gravitational lensing has the potential to constrain cosmological parameters to high precision. However, as shown by the Shear TEsting Programmes (STEP) and GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing (GREAT) Challenges, measuring galaxy…
We propose easy ways of correcting for the systematic errors caused by the photon noise and the pixelation effect in cosmic shear measurements. Our treatment of noise can reliably remove the noise contamination to the cosmic shear even when…
A microlensing lensing zone refers to the range of planet-star separations where the probability of detecting a planetary signal is high. Its conventional definition as the range between $\sim 0.6$ and 1.6 Einstein radii of the primary lens…