Related papers: The MACHO Project: Microlensing and Variable Stars
Stars in globular clusters can act either as sources for MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) located along the line of sight or as lenses for more distant background stars. Although the expected rate of microlensing events…
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 MACHO Project is a microlensing survey that monitors the brightnesses of 60 million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), Small Magellanic Cloud, and Galactic bulge. Our database presently contains about 80 billion photometric…
It has been shown by Paczy\'nski that gravitational microlensing is potentially a useful method for detecting the dark constituents of the halo of our galaxy, if their mass lies in the approximate domain $10^{-6}<M/M_\odot<10^{-1}$.…
(Abridged) A close scrutiny of the microlensing results towards the Magellanic clouds reveals that the stars within the Magellanic clouds are major contributors as lenses, and the contribution of MACHOs to dark matter is 0 to 5%. The…
We propose the existence of ultracompact minihalos as a new type of massive compact halo object (MACHO) and suggest an observational test to discover them. These new MACHOs are a powerful probe into the nature of dark matter and physics in…
We present the results from the OGLE-II survey (1996-2000) towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which has the aim of detecting the microlensing phenomena caused by dark matter compact objects in the Galactic Halo (Machos). We use high…
Recently the French EROS collaboration and the American-Australian MACHO collaboration have reported the observation of altogether three possible microlensing events by monitoring over several years the brightness of millions of stars in…
We analyze the first-year MACHO collaboration observations of microlensing towards the Galactic center using a new direct likelihood technique that is sensitive to the distribution of the events on the sky. We consider the full set of 41…
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…
Much interest has been generated recently by the ongoing MACHO, EROS and OGLE projects to identify gravitationally lensed stars from the Large Magellanic Cloud and Galactic bulge, and the positive identification of several events (Alcock et…
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…
Using eight dark matter haloes extracted from fully-self consistent cosmological N-body simulations, we perform microlensing experiments. A hypothetical observer is placed at a distance of 8.5 kpc from the centre of the halo measuring…
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…
Increasing evidences suggest that the Galactic halo is lumpy on kpc scales due to the accretion of at least a dozen small galaxies (LMC/SMC, Sgr, Fornax etc.). Faint stars in such lumpy structures can significant microlense a background…
After a decade of gravitational microlensing experiments, 13 to 17 events by MACHO (depending on quality) and two events by EROS have been detected. All of those have been observed in the direction of Large Magellanic Cloud. We use Evans…
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 observations of microlensing events in the LMC by the MACHO and EROS collaborations suggest that an important fraction of the galactic halo is in the form of Massive Halo Objects (MHO) of about 0.1 M_{\odot}. Here, we argue that…
EROS has been monitoring few million stars in the Magellanic clouds, as well as toward the Galactic bulge and spiral arms since 1996, to search for microlensing events. In this paper, we present briefly the EROS setup and scientific program…
The amount of dark matter in the solar neighbourhood is a poorly constrained quantity which is nevertheless used to normalise the properties of the dark halo. While the current surveys towards the LMC, SMC and the Galactic bulge probe the…