Pixel and Micro-lensing with NGST

Abstract

Within 8 years, the current microlensing surveys of M31 will provide several hundred events affecting unresolved stars. They will thus allow a statistical study of the dark matter in M31's halo. The NGST will resolve these stars and constrain the mass of the corresponding lenses. In case of on-line alerts from ground-based observations, real-time NGST follow-up with high signal-to-noise ratio will provide further constraints on the lenses. In addition, high resolution observations with NGST will complement XMM and the previous optical data and thus enable a closer insight of X-ray binaries within M31 to be obtained. The optimal instrumentation to achieve these scientific goals will be discussed. Last, the study of the dark matter encompassed in the galaxy clusters would be possible with high angular resolution observations on a large field camera and would open a new field of research.