Related papers: MACHO Mass Determination Based on Space Telescope …
The MACHO Project is searching for galactic dark matter in the form of massive compact halo objects (Machos). Millions of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and Galactic bulge are photometrically…
(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…
(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…
Binary microlensing light curves have a variety of morphologies. Many are indistinguishable from point lens light curves. Of those that deviate from the point lens form, caustic crossing light curves have tended to dominate identified…
We analyze the limitations imposed by photon counting statistics on extracting useful information about MACHOs from Earth-based parallax observations of microlensing events. We find that if one or more large (say $2.5\,\rm m$) telescopes…
There is now abundant evidence for the presence of large quantities of unseen matter surrounding normal galaxies, including our own$^{1,2}$. The nature of this `dark matter' is unknown, except that it cannot be made of normal stars, dust,…
We present a quantitative analysis of the effect of microlensing caused by random motion of individual stars in the galaxy which is lensing a background quasar. We calculate a large number of magnification patterns for positions of the…
A new type of gravitational microlensing experiment toward a field where stars are not resolved is being developed observationally and theoretically: pixel lensing. When the experiment is carried out toward the M31 bulge area, events may be…
Quasar microlensing can be used to constrain important astrophysical properties, such as the accretion disk size and the amount of stars in the lensing galaxy. The associated brightness variations over time, in particular high magnification…
We study the possibility of magnetic mass detection by the gravitational microlensing technique. Recently the theoretical effect of magnetic mass in the NUT space on the microlensing light curve has been studied. It was shown that in the…
We present a method to analyze binary-lens microlensing light curves with one well-sampled fold caustic crossing. In general, the surface of chi^2 shows extremely complicated behavior over the 9-parameter space that characterizes binary…
Microlensing events are being discovered and alerted by the two survey teams OGLE and MOA at an increasing rate. Around ten percent of these events involve binary lenses. Such events potentially contain much information on the physical…
We analyze PLANET photometric observations of the caustic-crossing binary-lens microlensing event, EROS BLG-2000-5, and find that modeling the observed light curve requires incorporation of the microlens parallax and the binary orbital…
The initial results of microlensing surveys toward the Galactic bulge and the LMC are puzzling. Toward the LMC, the total mass in MACHOs is of order half that required to explain the dark matter, but the estimated MACHO mass (~0.4 Msun) is…
I propose a radical revision in the search strategy for Massive Compact Objects (Machos) toward the Galactic bulge: monitor the entire $\sim 300$ square deg of the bulge and tune the search primarily to microlensing events of bright…
The expected microlensing events of the LMC by the MACHOs of the LMC itself are calculated and compared with analogue events by objects in the Galactic halo. The LMC matter distribution is modelled by a spherical halo and an exponential…
We estimate the fraction of mass that is composed of compact objects in gravitational lens galaxies. This study is based on microlensing measurements (obtained from the literature) of a sample of 29 quasar image pairs seen through 20 lens…
We use the statistics of caustic crossings induced by microlensing in the lens system Q~2237+0305 to study the lens galaxy peculiar velocity. We calculate the caustic crossing rates for a comprehensive family of stellar mass functions and…
Recent observations of lensed galaxies at cosmological distances have detected individual stars that are extremely magnified when crossing the caustics of lensing clusters. In idealized cluster lenses with smooth mass distributions, two…
In this paper, we investigate the intrinsic bias in detecting caustic crossings between Galactic halo and self-lensing events in the Magellanic Clouds. For this, we determine the region for optimal caustic-crossing detection in the…