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L. Le Guillou (CEA), EROS Collaboration
The discrepancy between the estimation of the mass of our Galaxy obtained from its visible components and the mass inferred from dynamical studies of its rotation seems to indicate the existence of a large amount of Galactic dark matter.
By searching for gravitational microlensing events towards stars in the Magellanic Clouds, the EROS collaboration (Expérience de Recherche d'Objets Sombres), amongst other groups, probes the content of the Galactic Halo and tests the hypothesis that halo dark matter is in the form of compact dark objects.
We have built a new pipeline based on Difference Image Analysis (DIA), and use it to process 5 years of data (1996-2001) towards the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The use of DIA techniques improves the quality of photometric measurements in crowded fields such as the SMC. Furthermore, with our DIA pipeline we are no longer restricted to searching for microlensing on stars in our catalog, which allows to detect microlensing events on very faint source stars, thus increasing the sensitivity. This search is sensitive to time scales between a few days and around 500 days corresponding to Halo objects in the mass range [0.01, 40]\,\mathrm{M}\odot.
We present lightcurves and fitted parameters of detected microlensing events. Very preliminary estimates of the detection efficiency and of the optical depth towards the SMC are also presented.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: leguillo@hep.saclay.cea.fr
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.