Related papers: Brown Dwarfs, White Knights and Demons

We study different models of dark matter distribution for the halo of our galaxy. In particular, we consider Eddington and King-Michie models, which [C[C, which include anisotropy in the velocity space, and compute in a self-consistent way…

We examine the most recent observational constraints arising from i) small-scale and large-scale Galactic dynamical properties, ii) star counts at faint magnitude and iii) microlensing experiments. From these constraints, we determine the…

Terrestrial microlens parallax is one of the very few methods that can measure the mass and number density of isolated dark low-mass objects, such as old free-floating planets and brown dwarfs. Terrestrial microlens parallax can be measured…

Microlensing observations have now become a useful tool in searching for non--luminous astrophysical compact objects (brown dwarfs, faint stars, neutron stars, black holes and even planets). Originally conceived for establishing whether the…

Brown dwarfs, stars with insufficient mass to burn hydrogen, could contribute to the dark matter in the Galactic disk, galactic halos or even a background critical density. We consider the detectability of such brown dwarfs in various…

We report the discovery and the analysis of the short timescale binary-lens microlensing event, MOA-2015-BLG-337. The lens system could be a planetary system with a very low mass host, around the brown dwarf/planetary mass boundary, or a…

The kinematics of isolated brown dwarfs in the Galaxy, beyond the solar neighborhood, is virtually unknown. Microlensing has the potential to probe this hidden population, as it can measure both the mass and five of the six phase-space…

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…

Having ruled out the possibility that stellar objects are the main contributor of the dark matter embedding galaxies, microlensing experiments cannot exclude the hypothesis that a significant fraction of the Milky Way dark halo might be…

The known nearby stars, moving in front of the background of distant stars and galaxies, create 'weak gravitational lensing' variations in their positions. These variations may be measurable with the HST, and they may allow a direct mass…

In this note we perform an analysis of the large set of microlensing events detected so far toward the Galactic center with the purpose of investigating whether some of the dark lenses are located in Galactic globular clusters. We find that…

There are lines of evidence suggesting that some of the observed microlensing events in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) are caused by ordinary star lenses as opposed to dark Machos in the Galactic halo. Efficient lensing…

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…

Due to the nature depending on only the gravitational field, microlensing, in principle, provides an important tool to detect faint and even dark brown dwarfs. However, the number of identified brown dwarfs is limited due to the difficulty…

There has recently been interest in multi-Solar mass Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) as a dark matter (DM) candidate. There are various microlensing, dynamical and accretion constraints on the abundance of PBHs in this mass range. Taken at…

Massive Compact objects in the halo, known as MACHOs, have been postulated as the origin of a substantial fraction of `dark matter' known to exist in the haloes of galaxies$^{1,2}$. Paczy\'nski$^3$ has suggested that it might possible to…

The nature of the several microlensing events observed by the MACHO team towards the LMC still remains controversial. Low-mass substellar objects and stars with masses larger than ~1 M_{sun} have been ruled out as major components of a…

Modelling perturbations of the Milky Way (MW) halo induced by the infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) offers new avenues to constrain the dark matter (DM) distribution in our Galaxy. A key observable is the reflex motion of the MW…

Halo initial mass functions (IMFs), heavily-biased toward white dwarf (WD) precursors (i.e. 1->8 M_sun), have been suggested as a suitable mechanism for explaining microlensing statistics along the line of sight to the LMC. Such IMFs can…

Short version: Zaritsky and Lin (1997, ZL97) have recently presented observations which can be interpreted as evidence for an intervening stellar population along the line-of-sight to the LMC, at a distance of ~34 kpc. They suggest that it…