White dwarfs and Galactic dark matter

Abstract

We discuss the recent discovery by Oppenheimer et al (2001) of old, cool white dwarf stars, which may be the first direct detection of Galactic halo dark matter. We argue here that the contribution of more mundane white dwarfs of the stellar halo and thick disk would contribute sufficiently to explain the new high velocity white dwarfs without invoking putative white dwarfs of the dark halo. This by no means rules out that the dark matter has been found, but it does constrain the overall contribution by white dwarfs brighter than M_V ~ 16 to significantly less than 1% of the Galactic dark matter. This work confirms a similar study by Reyle et al (2001).

8 pages, 8 figures. MNRAS style file

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• A multi-messenger study of the Milky Way's stellar disc and bulge with LISA, Gaia and LSST
• The Origin of the Microlensing Events Observed Towards the LMC and the Stellar Counterpart of the Magellanic Stream
• Large Magellanic Cloud Microlensing Optical Depth with Imperfect Event Selection
• Monte Carlo simulations of the halo white dwarf population
• Random Forest identification of the thin disk, thick disk and halo Gaia-DR2 white dwarf population
• The Gaia DR2 halo white dwarf population: the luminosity function, mass distribution and its star formation history
• The Fine-structure Constant as a Probe of Chemical Evolution and AGB Nucleosynthesis in Damped Lyman-alpha Systems
• A population synthesis fitting of the $Gaia$ resolved white dwarf binary population within 100 pc
• Extremely faint high proper motion objects from SDSS stripe 82 - Optical classification spectroscopy of about 40 new objects
• Trigonometric parallaxes of high velocity halo white dwarf candidates
• Cooling of Neutron Stars admixed with Light Dark Matter: a case study
• Photometric Confirmation of MACHO Large Magellanic Cloud Microlensing Events
• Simulating a White Dwarf-dominated Galactic Halo
• Disk or Halo white dwarfs? Kinematic analysis of high proper motion surveys
• The contribution of red dwarfs and white dwarfs to the halo dark matter
• The glow of primordial remnants
• Dark halo baryons not in ancient halo white dwarfs
• Spectroscopic classification and Gaia DR2 parallaxes of new nearby white dwarfs among selected blue proper motion stars
• Luminosity limits on white dwarfs in a Galactic shroud