Microlensing and Variability in the Bulge of M31

Abstract

For the past five seasons, the Angstrom Project, an international microlensing collaboration, has been making observations of the central bulge of M31, the Andromeda galaxy, searching for microlensing events. This thesis describes the work that has been done to develop an automatic candidate selection pipeline which enables lensing candidates to be found even if they are blended with periodic variable baseline, something which has never been attempted before in the same way. As a by-product of this process, many variable stars are found and their properties are investigated and characterised. The results of the investigations to date are presented. The final selection of microlensing candidates selected from the most recent Angstrom lightcurve data set is shown, and a separate more detailed investigation into one particularly interesting microlensing candidate of very short duration is described.Comment: PhD Thesis, Astrophysics Research Institute, Liverpool John Moores University, accepted Jan 11th 2010- 319 page