Related papers: Microlensing, or Galactic Twinkling
We study the accuracy of inference of the massive halo objects' (MHO or `Macho') mass function from microlensing events observed toward LMC. Assuming the spatial distribution and kinematics of the objects are known, the slope and the range…
Dark matter haloes and subhaloes that host no luminous counterpart are predicted within our current understanding of galaxy formation within a $\Lambda$CDM paradigm. Observational tests, such as gravitational lensing, have made potential…
We study the use of parallax microlensing to separate the effects of the mass function of dark massive halo objects (MHOs or `machos') on the one hand and their spatial distribution and kinematics on the other. This disentanglement is…
We present here an analysis of the light curves of 5.3 million stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud observed by EROS (Exp\'erience de Recherche d'Objets Sombres). One star exhibits a variation that is best interpreted as due to gravitational…
According to the cold dark matter scenario, a large number of dark subhalos should be located within the halo of each Milky-way sized galaxy. One promising possibility for detecting such subhalos is to try to observe their gravitational…
Dark matter may be in the form of non-baryonic structures such as compact subhalos and boson stars. Structures weighing between asteroid and solar masses may be discovered via gravitational microlensing, an astronomical probe that has in…
The study of dark matter substructure through strong gravitational lensing has shown enormous promise in probing the properties of dark matter on sub-galactic scales. This approach has already been used to place strong constraints on a wide…
Microlensing is now a very popular observational astronomical technique. The investigations accessible through this effect range from the dark matter problem to the search for extra-solar planets. In this review, the techniques to search…
Studies of gravitational microlensing effects require the estimation of their detection efficiency as soon as one wants to quantify the massive compact objects along the line of sight of source targets. This is particularly important for…
Microlensing is a powerful technique to study the Galactic population of "dark" objects such as exoplanets both bound and unbound, brown dwarfs, low-luminosity stars, old white dwarfs, neutron stars, and almost the only way to study…
The longest microlensing events provide enough information to estimate the mass and distance of the lens. Among hundreds of millions of stars which were monitored for many years by the OGLE project we selected those with clear parallax…
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…
The microlensing optical depth to Baade's Window constrains the minimum total mass in baryonic matter within the Solar circle to be greater than 3.9 x 10^{10} solar masses, assuming the inner Galaxy is barred with viewing angle of roughly…
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…
Microlensing started with the seminal paper by Paczy\'nski in 1986, first with observations towards the Large Magellanic Cloud and the galactic bulge. Since then many other targets have been observed and new applications have been found. In…
For almost twenty years models of the Galaxy have included a dark halo responsible for supporting a substantial fraction of the local rotation velocity and a flat rotation curve at large distances. Estimates of the local halo density range…
Some previous studies have suggested that massive and intermediate-mass primordial black holes (PBHs) could comprise a substantial fraction of dark matter in the Universe. Such black holes, if they existed in the Milky Way halo, would give…
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 the Galaxy contains ~10^{11}M_sol in cold gas clouds of ~Jovian mass and \~AU size, these clouds will act as converging lenses for optical light, magnifying background stars at a detectable rate. The resulting light curves can resemble…
Gravitational lensing is one of a number of methods used to probe the distribution of dark mass in the Universe. On galactic scales, complementary techniques include the use of stellar kinematics, kinematics and morphology of the neutral…