Related papers: Difference Image Analysis of Galactic Microlensing…
The microlensing parallax campaign with the $Spitzer$ space telescope aims to measure masses and distances of microlensing events seen towards the Galactic bulge, with a focus on planetary microlensing events. The hope is to measure how the…
Ongoing microlensing surveys have already yielded more than five hundred microlensing events, most of which have been identified in real-time. In this review I present the basic theory and observational status of these surveys. I highlight…
GAIA is the ``super-Hipparcos'' survey satellite selected as a Cornerstone 6 mission by the European Space Agency. GAIA can measure microlensing by the small excursions of the light centroid that occur during events. The all-sky…
We present the lightcurves of 21 gravitational microlensing events from the first six years of the MACHO Project gravitational microlensing survey which are likely examples of lensing by binary systems. These events were manually selected…
We study the benefits of polarimetry observations of microlensing events to detect and characterize circumstellar disks around the microlensed stars located at the Galactic bulge. These disks which are unresolvable from their host stars…
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…
We review recent gravitational microlensing results from the EROS, MACHO, and OGLE collaborations, and present some details of the very latest MACHO results toward the Galactic Bulge. The MACHO collaboration has now discovered in excess of…
Context: Astrometric gravitational microlensing is an excellent tool to determine the mass of stellar objects. Using precise astrometric measurements of the lensed position of a background source in combination with accurate predictions of…
We propose and evaluate the feasibility of a new strategy to search for planets via microlensing. This new strategy is designed to detect planets in "wide" orbits, i.e., with orbital separation, $a$ greater than $\sim 1.5 R_E$. Planets in…
We show that the statistical error, $\sigma_{\tau}$, in estimating the optical depth, $\tau$, due to microlensing is substantially higher than the naive Poisson estimate: $\sigma_{\tau} = \sqrt{\eta / N} \tau$, where $N$ is the number of…
Context: Difference imaging has proven to be a powerful technique for detecting and monitoring the variability of unresolved stellar sources in M 31. Using this technique in surveys of galaxies outside the Local Group could have many…
Microlensing events can be used to directly measure the masses of single field stars to a precision of $\sim$1-10\%. The majority of direct mass measurements for stellar and sub-stellar objects typically only come from observations of…
We present and study the largest and the most comprehensive catalog of microlensing events ever constructed. The sample of standard microlensing events comprises 3718 unique events from years 2001--2009, with 1409 not detected before in…
For the first time we detected microlensing events at zero latitude in the Galactic bulge using the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea Survey (VVV) data. We have discovered a total sample of N = 630 events within an area covering 20.7 sq.…
We present the Catalog of microlensing events detected toward the Galactic bulge in three observing seasons, 1997--1999, during the OGLE-II microlensing survey. The search for microlensing events was performed using a database of about…
Context: One of the rarest types of variability is the phenomenon of gravitational microlensing, a transient brightening of a background star due to an intervening lensing object. Microlensing is a powerful tool in studying the invisible or…
In this article we review the astrophysical application of gravitational microlensing. After introducing the history of gravitational lensing, we present the key equations and concept of microlensing. The most frequent microlensing events…
Upcoming LSST survey gives an unprecedented opportunity for studying populations of intrinsically faint objects using microlensing technique. Large field of view and aperture allow effective time-series observations of many stars in…
The MACHO project carries out regular photometric monitoring of millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds and Galactic Bulge, to search for very rare gravitational microlensing events due to compact objects in the galactic halo and disk. A…
I demonstrate that one can detect pixel gravitational microlensing events at the rate $\sim 180\ {\rm events}\ {\rm yr}^{-1}$ and that some fraction of events ($\sim 15$) will be good enough to measure time scales at the $20\%$ level if the…