Related papers: The MACHO Project: Microlensing and Variable Stars
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…
Current microlensing searches calibrate the mass fraction of the Milky Way halo which is in the form of Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs). We show that surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) can probe the same quantity in…
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…
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…
Recent novel observations have probed the baryonic fraction of the galactic dark matter that has eluded astronomers for decades. Late in 1993, the MACHO and EROS collaborations announced in this journal the detection of transient and…
Foundations of standard theory of microlensing are described, namely we consider microlensing stars in Galactic bulge, the Magellanic Clouds or other nearby galaxies. We suppose that gravitational microlenses lie between an Earth observer…
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…
The status of the microlensing search for galactic dark matter in the form of massive astronomical compact halo objects (machos) is reviewed. Unresolved issues are discussed, as well as possible ways to solve these.
The simplest interpretation of the microlensing events observed towards the Large Magellanic Cloud is that approximately half of the mass of the Milky Way halo is in the form of MAssive Compact Halo Objects with $M \sim 0.5 M_{\odot}$. This…
We present an analysis of the results of the OGLE-III microlensing campaign towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We evaluate for all the possible lens populations along the line of sight the expected microlensing quantities, number of…
The simplest interpretation of the microlensing events observed towards the Large Magellanic Clouds is that approximately half of the mass of the Milky Way halo is in the form of MAssive Compact Halo Objects with $M \sim 0.5 M_{\odot}$. It…
The observations of microlensing events in the Large Magellanic Cloud suggest that a sizable fraction (\sim 50%) of the galactic halo is in the form of MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) with an average mass $\sim 0.27…
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…
The POINT-AGAPE collaboration is carrying out a search for gravitational microlensing toward M31 to reveal galactic dark matter in the form of MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) in the halos of the Milky Way and M31. A…
If the Universe has a significant baryonic dark component in the form of compact objects in galaxy halos (machos), then there is a minute chance (about $10^{-7}$) that one of the Galactic machos passes sufficiently close to our line of…
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…
The failure to find evidence for elementary particles that could serve as the constituents of dark matter brings to mind suggestions that dark matter might consist of massive compact objects (MACHOs). In particular, it has recently been…
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…
We present final results from the first phase of the EROS search for gravitational microlensing of stars in the Magellanic Clouds by unseen deflectors (machos: MAssive Compact Halo Objects). The search is sensitive to events with time…
A review of the MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) project is presented. MOA is a collaboration of approximately 30 astronomers from New Zealand and Japan established with the aim of finding and detecting microlensing events…