Related papers: Microlensing: Current Results and Future Prospects
Gravitational microlensing of planetary-mass objects (or "nanolensing", as it has been termed) can be used to probe the distribution of mass in a galaxy that is acting as a gravitational lens. Microlensing and nanolensing light curve…
How is mass distributed in the Universe? How does it compare with the distribution of light and stars? We address these questions by examining the distribution of mass, determined from weak lensing observations, and starlight, around…
I review proposals for explaining the current gravitational microlensing results from the EROS and MACHO surveys towards the Magellanic Clouds. Solutions involving massive compact halo objects (MACHOs), both baryonic and non-baryonic, as…
The recently reported microlensing events of the LMC have caused much excitement, and have been interpreted as due to `dark objects' (MACHOs) in the halo of our Galaxy. It is shown here that the stars within the LMC play a dominant role as…
Following previous suggestions of other researchers, this paper discusses the prospects for astrometric observation of MACHO gravitational microlensing events. We derive the expected astrometric observables for a simple microlensing event…
We examine the possibility that galactic halos are collisionless ensembles of scalar field ``massive compact halo objects'' (MACHOs). Using mass constraints from MACHO microlensing and from theoretical arguments on halos made up of massive…
In the context of this paper, microlenses present as oblate clusters of dark matter structures called massive astrophysical compact halo object(MACHO) in the galactic halo are considered. The NFW density profile [1] is derived from the…
We use a hybrid approach that combines high-resolution simulations of the formation of a Milky Way-like halo with a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation to study the mass content of dwarf galaxies in the concordance $\Lambda$CDM…
Recent observations of microlensing events in the Large Magellanic Cloud suggest that a sizeable fraction of the galactic halo is in form of MACHOs with mass less than abou 0.1 M_{\odot}. Here we argue that molecular clouds (mainly H_2)…
If the dark halo matter is primarily composed of MACHOs toward the lower end of the possible detection range ($ < 10^{-3}$ $M_{\odot}$) a fraction of the lens detection events should involve the lens crossing directly in front of the disk…
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).…
Black hole-like objects with mass greater than $10 M_{\odot}$, as discovered by gravitational antennas, can produce long time-scale (several years) gravitational microlensing effects. Considered separately, previous microlensing surveys…
In the framework of microlensing searches towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), we discuss the results presented by the OGLE collaboration for their OGLE-II campaign \citep{lukas09}. We evaluate the optical depth, the duration and the…
A significant fraction of non-baryonic or baryonic dark matter in galactic halos may consist of MASsive Compact Objects (MASCOs) with mass M=10^{1-4}M_{sun}. Possible candidates for such compact objects include primordial black holes or…
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…
We investigate the published constraints on MACHOs in the mass region $10^2 - 10^5 M_{\odot}$ and their possible contribution to dark matter. We focus on constraints which rely on the accretion of matter which emits X-rays that can lead,…
We propose a near-infrared microlensing survey of the central 2 degree field of the Galactic Center, in an attempt to estimate the surface density and mass distribution of distant free-floating brown dwarfs in the bulge and in the disk,…
We describe the results of a search for microlensing events affecting stars in the outer bulge and inner disk of M31, due both to masses in M31 and the Galaxy. These observations, from 1994 and 1995 on the Vatican Advanced Technology…
Gravitational microlensing is a robust tool to detect and directly measure the abundance and mass of any kind of compact objects, either in our galaxy or in the extragalatic domain. On basis to generic, broadly applicable arguments, it is…
The mass function and statistics of binaries provide important diagnostics of the star formation process. Despite this importance, the mass function at low masses remains poorly known due to observational difficulties caused by the…