Title:	MicroLensing Light Curves in M31 from ZTF data
DNr:	SNIC 2019/7-61
Project Type:	SNIC Small Compute
Principal Investigator:	Rahul Biswas <rahul.biswas@fysik.su.se>
Affiliation:	Stockholms universitet
Duration:	2019-09-04 – 2019-11-01
Classification:	10305
Keywords:

Abstract

While cosmological observations are well explained by a concordance Lambda CDM model, the physical nature of the most abundant components dark energy and dark matter remain unknown. Of different origins theorized for dark matter, a few of them (for eg. Prmordial Black Holes, relics of phase transitions) would comprise of relatively compact massive objects while others (for eg. WIMPS and BEC) would comprise of diffused distributions (halos) of low mass particles. If a fraction of the dark matter density was due to compact objects, stars in nearby galaxies such as the Andromeda (M31) could be statistically micro-lensed by intervening compact objects. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is an ongoing time domain astronomical survey with public and private data [1], with a large fraction of the images being processed at IPAC [2]. We would like to search for signatures of microlensed stars in the M31 in this dataset. Since the standard processing of image subtraction provided by IPAC is challenging in crowded stellar fields like the Andromeda (M31), and not required for our goal, we wish to process these images differently to obtain light curves at the location of stars in the M31 using the publicly available dataset of resolved stars from the PHAT survey. The project involves constructing such light curves for about 1000 time epochs from ZTF for a few times 20 million stars from PHAT [3]. To try out our codes at the resouces from SNIC, we would like to have a small allocation on a linux cluster: Both Tetralith or ABISKO seem good for this work.