Variable Stars in the Large Magellanic Clouds

Stromlo & Siding Spring Observatories, the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the Santa Barbara, San Diego, & Berkeley campuses of the University of California, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The primary aim of the project is a search for dark matter in the halo of the Milky Way in the form of objects like brown dwarfs or planets also named MACHOs, for MAssive Compact Halo Objects.

The signature of these MACHOs is the occasional amplification of the light from extragalactic stars by the gravitational lens effect. The amplification can be large, but events are extremely rare: it is necessary to monitor photometrically several million stars for a period of years in order to obtain a useful detection rate. The MACHO project is described by Alcock et al. (1992, in "Robotic Telescopes in the 1990s", A.V. Fillippenko Ed., ASP Conf.