Related papers: The inverse problem in microlensing: from the opti…
The detection of microlensing has opened the way for the development of new methods in galactic astronomy. This series of papers investigates what microlensing can teach us about the structure and shape of the dark halo. In this paper we…
We study the prospects for the current microlensing searches, which have recently discovered several candidates, to yield useful information about the flattening of the Galaxy dark matter halo. Models of HI warps and N-body simulations of…
We investigate the dark halo lens mass function (MF) for a wide class of spheroidal non singular isothermal models comparing observed and observable microlensing quantities for MACHO observations towards LMC and taking into account the…
We investigated the dependence of the optical depth $\tau$ of the microlensing events on model parameters of the Galactic halo. We only consider Galactic mass models in which the rotation curve inside the Sun is compatible with the…
It is widely believed that dark matter halos are flattened, that is closer to oblate than prolate. The evidence cited is based largely on observations of galaxies which do not look anything like our own and on numerical simulations which…
We detail how microlensing internal to M31 could be used to test whether a large fraction of the matter in spiral galaxy haloes is composed of dark objects with masses comparable to those of stars, and in the process show how the…
We discuss the tight interconnection between microlensing optical depths, flattening of dark haloes and low-to-intermediate redshift baryonic census. By analysing plots of the microlensing optical depth as a function of galactic coordinates…
We present a simple model for describing intrinsic correlations for galaxy sizes based on the halo model. Studying these correlations is important both to improve our understanding of galaxy properties and because it is an important…
One of the biggest obstacles to our full understanding of the global dynamics in Milky Way and other spiral galaxies is uncertainty with respect to the form of baryonic dark matter in galactic haloes. Two basic forms discussed recently are…
Galaxy-galaxy lensing is a powerful probe of the relation between galaxies and dark matter halos, but its theoretical interpretation requires a careful modeling of various contributions, such as the contribution from central and satellite…
We provide a set of microlensing optical depth maps for M31. Optical depths towards Andromeda were calculated on the basis of a four component model of the lens and source populations: disk and bulge sources lensed by bulge, M31 halo and…
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 $10^{-6} < M/M_{\odot} < 10^{-1}$.…
Disk-halo models of the Galaxy and LMC are constructed and used to analyse the microlensing data-set. Deflectors in the LMC bar, disk and halo provide an optical depth to microlensing of $\sim 2 \times 10^{-7}$. Deflectors in the Galactic…
(Abridged version): The optical depth is widely used in Galactic microlensing studies as a means to determine the density of MACHOs, since in theory it depends only upon their spatial distribution and is therefore less model-dependent than…
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.
In recent years various models for the Galactic distribution of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) have been proposed for the interpretation of microlensing toward the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). A direct way to fit the best model is…
We propose a new technique to directly measure the shapes of dark matter halos of galaxies using weak gravitational lensing. Extending the standard galaxy-galaxy lensing method, we show that the shape parameters of the mass distribution of…
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…
If massive compact halo objects (\ms) are detected in ongoing searches, then \tsmctlmc, the ratio of the optical depth toward the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, will be a robust indicator of the flattening of the Galactic dark matter…
By means of extensive galactic modeling we study the implications of the more than eighty microlensing events that have now been observed for the composition of the dark halo of the Galaxy, as well as for other properties of the Galaxy. We…