Halo Microlensing in M31 and the Luminosity Function of the Disk and Halo

Details Halo Microlensing in M31 and the Luminosity Function of the Disk and Halo Halo Microlensing in M31 and the Luminosity Function of the Disk and Halo

Dec 1997

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997hst..prop.7970c&link_type=abstract

HST Proposal ID #7970

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Hst Proposal Id #7970 Extragalactic Astrophysics

Scientific paper

We have discovered several microlensing events affecting stars in M31 and presumably due to stellar-mass MACHOs, in a survey of the M31 and Galactic halos. We are embarked on a larger survey that will find 50-100 such events per yearly observing season, and thereby map out M31's MACHO halo in a way that will be impossible for our Galaxy for many years to come. Our survey is unique in allowing lensing to be studied at locations throughout a galaxy, allowing halo spatial distribution models for the halo to be tested. We propose to use HST to determine the luminosity function in our survey sample and allow us to find the contribution of MACHOs to the dark matter in M31 and the Galaxy and produce strong constraints complementary to other MACHO searches in our Galaxy's halo alone. Since our sample involves stars that are crowded in ground-based images, we need HST to allow us to determine the luminosity function of stars in the field, thereby determining the number of possible lensing sources, and converting our detected event rates into actual MACHO number densities. Simultaneously we can explore the stellar population in the relatively unstudied inner disk and bulge via its variable stars, luminosity function and color- magnitude diagram.

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