EXPERIMENTAL LIMITS ON THE DARK MATTER HALO OF THE GALAXY FROM GRAVITATIONAL MICROLENSING.

Abstract

We have monitored 8.6 million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud for 1.1 years and have found 3 events consistent with gravitational microlensing. We place strong constraints on the Galactic halo content in the form of compact lensing objects in the mass range $10^{-4} \msun$ to $10^{-1} \msun$. Three events is fewer than expected for a standard spherical halo of objects in this mass range, but appears to exceed the number expected from known Galactic populations. Fitting a naive spherical halo model to our data yields a MACHO fraction $f = 0.20^{+0.33}_{-0.14}$, which implies a total MACHO mass (inside 50 kpc) of $8.0^{+14}_{-6}\ten{10} \msun$, and a microlensing optical depth $9^{+15}_{-7} \ten{-8}$ ($\sim 68$\% CL).

8 pages, uuencoded compressed PostScript, 4 figures included (400kB). Submitted to Phys Rev Lett.