Related papers: MACHOs: The Plot Thickens
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…
(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…
We will review some results based on the EROS and the on going EROS-2 microlensing surveys to search for dark matter in the Galactic halo via microlensing effects on LMC/SMC stars. Microlensing surveys provide systematic observations for…
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 compute the optical depth and particularly the number of expected events for…
A recent re-analysis of EGRET data by Dixon et al. has led to the discovery of a statistically significant diffuse $\gamma$-ray emission from the galactic halo. We show that this emission can naturally be accounted for within a…
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…
It has been proposed that the Galaxy might contain a population of cold clouds in numbers sufficient to account for a substantial fraction of the total mass of the Galaxy. These clouds would have masses of the order of 10^{-3} Solar mass…
We suggest a new component of the Milky Way galaxy that can account for both the optical depth and the event durations obtained by the MACHO microlensing survey toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. This component is consistent with recent…
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…
The interpretation of microlensing results towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) still remains controversial. White dwarfs have been proposed to explain these results and, hence, to contribute significantly to the mass budget of our…
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…
The EROS-2 collaboration has conducted a survey of the Magellanic Clouds between July 1996 and February 2003 (6.7 years), in order to search for microlensing phenomena due to putative machos (massive astronomical compact halo objects).…
The nature of the several microlensing events observed by the MACHO team towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is still a subject of debate. Low-mass substellar objects and stars with masses larger than ~M_{sun} have been ruled out as…
Recent determination of the outer rotation curve of the Galaxy suggests that the total Galactic mass is likely to concentrate into a region of radius $\sim2R_0$. If this finding is correct, the previously estimated optical depth of…
We show that current microlensing and dynamical observations of the Galaxy permit to set interesting constraints on the Dark Matter local density and profile slope towards the galactic centre. Assuming state-of-the-art models for the…
There appear to be three challenges that any theory of dark matter must face: (i) why is $\Omega_{DM}$ of the same order as $\Omega_{Baryons}$ ? (ii) what are the near solar mass objects ($\sim 0.5 M_{\odot}$) observed by the MACHO…
The historical microlensing surveys MACHO, EROS, MOA and OGLE (hereafter summarized in the MEMO acronym) have searched for microlensing toward the LMC for a total duration of 27 years. We have studied the potential of joining all databases…
The recent determination of the dark matter density in the Universe by the WMAP satellite has brought new attention to the interplay of results from particle physics experiments at accelerators and from cosmology. In this paper we discuss…
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…
We show that the baryonic gas content of the halo of our galaxy can be probed by performing a multipole expansion on the distribution of diffuse background gamma-ray emission. While the monopole moment (isotropic background) can be used to…