The main research subject in the astrophysics and astronomy group of IUT is the gravitational microlensing and its applications.
When the light of a background source star passes from the gravitational potential of a foreground and collinear object, the light trajectory is bent toward the center of gravity and as a result, two distorted images are formed. The angular distance between images is too small to be resolved and the observer receives their total light which is magnified with respect to the baseline flux of the source star. This phenomenon is the so-called gravitational microlensing.
Gravitational microlensing is a method for detecting extrasolar planets, probing the fraction of dark matter in the form of MACHOs, studying the stellar surface and its perturbations, studying the Galactic structure and its models, etc. In this group, we aim to extend and study these applications.