Microlensing event - The temporary brightening of a distant object that occurs because its light is focused on the Earth by the gravitational lensing of a nearer body ...
Microlensing events occur when light travelling towards Earth is deflected by the gravity of an intervening mass.
Microlensing event form the MACHO project used to help determine the mass of the foreground single star. The star's mass is calculated to be 1/10 that of the Sun.
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The first microlensing events towards the Large Magellanic Cloud which might be indicative of dark matter were reported in back to back Nature papers by the MACHO [6] and EROS [7] collaborations in 1993.
The study detected 474 individual microlensing events, ten of which lasted for less than two days, ...
Observations of the halo of the Milky Way, in search of gravitational microlensing events, show that the number of MACHOs is not likely to be sufficient to account for the required mass.
Milky Way dark matter halo ...
Several experiments are know running to look for microlensing events toward the Large Magellanic Cloud and the bulge of the Milky Way. It appears that about one-half of the mass of the halo of the Milky Way is made of 0.
In summary whilst they did detect microlensing events the number of events was not enough to suggest that a MACHO population of dark objects between 0.1 - 0.9 M⊙ could add more than 20% to the known mass discrepancy in the Galaxy halo.
have attempted to detect MACHOs through gravitational microlensing (amplification) of the light from background stars, first using the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) as a background and more recently using Andromeda. A number of microlensing events ...
The warped space acts like a lens, focusing and magnifying the light of the background star, causing it to brighten suddenly, as seen by us. There have been several surveys over the past few years to search for these microlensing events.
 See also: Galaxy, Galaxies, Gravitation, Distance, Light
  
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