Related papers: The MACHO Project Dark Matter Search
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 observations have now become a useful tool in searching for non--luminous astrophysical compact objects (brown dwarfs, faint stars, neutron stars, black holes and even planets). Originally conceived for establishing whether the…
We present results from a search for gravitational microlensing of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud by low mass objects in the Galactic Halo. The search uses the CCD light curves of about 82,000 stars with up to 46 measurements per night…
Using eight dark matter haloes extracted from fully-self consistent cosmological N-body simulations, we perform microlensing experiments. A hypothetical observer is placed at a distance of 8.5 kpc from the centre of the halo measuring…
Stars in globular clusters can act either as sources for MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) located along the line of sight or as lenses for more distant background stars. Although the expected rate of microlensing events…
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}…
A straightforward interpretation of the MACHO microlensing results in the direction of the Magellanic Clouds suggests that an important fraction of the baryonic dark matter component of our Galaxy is in the form of old white dwarfs. If…
The MACHO collaboration has recently analyzed 2.1 years of photometric data for about 8.5 million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This analysis has revealed 8 candidate microlensing events and a total microlensing optical depth…
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…
Recent observations of microlensing events in the Large Magellanic Cloud by the MACHO and EROS collaborations suggest that an important fraction of the galactic halo is in form of Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) with…
Microlensing events towards the Large Magellanic Cloud entail that a sizable fraction of dark matter is in the form of MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects), presumably located in the halo of the Galaxy. Within the present…
Five years of EROS data towards the Small Magellanic Cloud have been searched for gravitational microlensing events, using a new, more accurate method to assess the impact of stellar blending on the efficiency. Four long-duration candidates…
We present the results from the OGLE-II survey (1996-2000) towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which has the aim of detecting the microlensing phenomena caused by dark matter compact objects in the Galactic Halo (Machos). We use high…
We describe a few recent microlensing results from the MACHO Collaboration. The aim of the MACHO Project was the identification and quantitative description of dark and luminous matter in the Milky Way using microlensing toward the…
We report on a search for long duration microlensing events towards the Large Magellanic Cloud. We find none, and therefore put limits on the contribution of high mass objects to the Galactic dark matter. At 95% confidence level we exclude…
The MACHO project carries out regular photometric monitoring of millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds and Galactic Bulge, to search for very rare gravitational microlensing events due to compact objects in the galactic halo and disk. A…
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…
The EROS-2 project was designed to test the hypothesis that massive compact halo objects (the so-called ``machos'') could be a major component of the dark matter halo of the Milky Way galaxy. To this end, EROS-2 monitored over 6.7 years…
We report the detection of 45 candidate microlensing events in fields toward the Galactic bulge. These come from the analysis of 24 fields containing 12.6 million stars observed for 190 days in 1993. Many of these events are of extremely…
I review recent results from gravitational microlensing surveys of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The combined microlensing optical depth of the MACHO and EROS-1 surveys is tau_LMC = 2.1{+1.3/-0.8}* 10^{-7} which is substantially larger than…