We search for microlensing events in the highly reddened areas surrounding the Galactic center using the near-IR observations with the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea Survey ( VVV ) .
We report the discovery of 182 new microlensing events , based on observations acquired between the years 2010 and 2015 .
We present the color-magnitude diagrams of the microlensing sources for the VVV tiles b332 , b333 , and b334 , which were independently analyzed , and show good qualitative agreement amongst themselves .
We detect an excess of microlensing events in the central tile b333 in comparison with the other two tiles , suggesting that the microlensing optical depth keeps rising all the way to the Galactic center .
We derive the Einstein radius crossing time for all of the observed events .
The observed event timescales range from t _ { E } = 5 to 200 days .
The resulting timescale distribution shows a mean timescale of < t _ { E } > = 30.91 days for the complete sample ( N = 182 events ) , and < t _ { E } > = 29.93 days if restricted only for the red clump ( RC ) giant sources ( N = 96 RC events ) .
There are 20 long timescale events ( t _ { E } \geq 100 days ) that suggests the presence of massive lenses ( black holes ) or disk-disk event .
This work demonstrates that the VVV Survey is a powerful tool to detect intermediate/long timescale microlensing events in highly reddened areas , and it enables a number of future applications , from analyzing individual events to computing the statistics for the inner Galactic mass and kinematic distributions , in aid of future ground- and space-based experiments .