ASTRI (Astrofisica a Specchi con Tecnologia Replicante Italiana) is a Flagship Project financed by the Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research and led by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics. It represents the Italian propo
sal for the development of the Small Size Telescope system of the Cherenkov Telescope Array, the next generation observatory for Very High Energy gamma-rays (20 GeV - 100 TeV). The ASTRI end-to-end prototype will be installed at Serra La Nave (Catania, Italy) and it will see the first light at the beginning of 2014. We describe the expected performance of the prototype on few selected test cases of the northern emisphere. The aim of the prototype is to probe the technological solutions and the nominal performance of the various telescopes subsystems.
We consider isolated compact remnants (ICoRs), i.e. neutrons stars and black holes that do not reside in binary systems and therefore cannot be detected as X-ray binaries. ICoRs may represent $sim,5$ percent of the stellar mass budget of the Galaxy,
but they are very hard to detect. Here we explore the possibility of using microlensing to identify ICoRs. In a previous paper we described a simulation of neutron star evolution in phase space in the Galaxy, taking into account the distribution of the progenitors and the kick at formation. Here we first reconsider the evolution and distribution of neutron stars and black holes adding a bulge component. From the new distributions we calculate the microlensing optical depth, event rate and distribution of event time scales, comparing and contrasting the case of ICoRs and normal stars. We find that the contribution of remnants to optical depth is slightly lower than without kinematics, owing to the evaporation from the Galaxy. On the other hand, the relative contribution to the rate of events is a factor $sim,5$ higher. In all, $sim,6-7$ percent of the events are likely related to ICoRs. In particular, $sim,30-40$ percent of the events with duration $>,100$ days are possibly related to black holes. It seems therefore that microlensing observations are a suitable tool to probe the population of Galactic ICoRs.
