Related papers: The MACHO Project Dark Matter Search
Since the first discovery of microlensing events nearly two decades ago, gravitational microlensing has accumulated tens of TBytes of data and developed into a powerful astrophysical technique with diverse applications. The review starts…
I present a new analysis of the MACHO Project 5.7 year Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) microlensing data set that incorporates the effects of contamination of the microlensing event sample by variable stars. Photometric monitoring of MACHO LMC…
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…
EROS (Exp\'erience de Recherche d'Objets Sombres) has been monitoring the luminosity of 4 million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud in order to search for gravitational microlensing by unseen objects in the galactic halo. We present here…
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…
The nature and the location of the lenses discovered in the microlensing surveys done so far towards the LMC remain unclear. Motivated by these questions we computed the optical depth for the different intervening populations and the number…
Models of our galaxy based on dynamical observations predict a spheroid component much heavier than accounted for by direct measurements of star counts and high velocity stars. If, as first suggested by Caldwell and Ostriker, this…
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 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…
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…
We present preliminary results of the analysis of 5 years of MACHO data on the Galactic bulge microlensing events with clump giants as sources. In particular, we discuss: 1) the selection of `giant' events, 2) distribution of impact…
Recent results from gravitational microlensing experiments, such as MACHO, indicate that a substantial fraction of the Galactic dark matter (DM) is in compact form, with a typical mass in the range ~0.05 - 1 Mo. This mass range favours the…
The MACHO Collaboration's search for baryonic dark matter via its gravitational microlensing signature has generated a massive database of time ordered photometry of millions of stars in the LMC and the bulge of the Milky Way. The search's…
(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…
Dark matter is an important ingredient of galaxies, as was recognised early on by Ken Freeman himself! Evidence for dark matter halos is still indirect, based on analysing motions of tracers such as gas and stars. In a sense the visible…
The simplest interpretation of the microlensing events towards the Large Magellanic Cloud detected by the MACHO and EROS collaborations is that about one third of the halo of our own Milky Way galaxy exists in the form of objects of around…
We review recent gravitational microlensing results from the EROS, MACHO, and OGLE collaborations, and present some details of the very latest MACHO results toward the Galactic Bulge. The MACHO collaboration has now discovered in excess of…
The dark matter in Galactic halos, or some fraction of it, may be in the form of dark clusters which consist of small mass objects. Carr & Lacey (1987) have derived the permissible properties of such systems, and proposed the existence of…
Four microlensing collaborations are presently searching for compact matter in the Galaxy and all have detected possible candidates. Using the detection efficiencies recently published by the MACHO and OGLE collaborations, we present…
We present follow-up observations of a gravitational microlensing candidate found by the MACHO collaboration in the Galactic bulge. The photometric data cover a period near the maximum of the event and may be used to construct complete…