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Using Optical And Near-Infrared Photometry To Test Macho Lens Candidates, Ted Von Hippel, Et Al.

Publications

We obtained new VLT/ISAAC H-band observations for five MACHO LMC source stars and adjacent LMC field regions. After combining our near-IR photometry with Hubble Space Telescope/PC BVRI optical photometry, we compared the MACHO objects to the adjacent field stars in a variety of color-magnitude and color-color diagrams. These diagnostic diagrams were chosen to be sensitive to our hypothesis that at least some of the MACHO lenses were foreground Galactic disk or thick-disk M dwarfs. For the five lensed objects we studied, our hypothesis could be ruled out for main-sequence lens masses ≥0.1 M☉ for distances out to …