Disk or Halo white dwarfs? Kinematic analysis of high proper motion surveys

Abstract

We present an alternative method for the kinematic analysis of high proper motion surveys and discuss its application to the survey of Oppenheimer et al. (2001) for the selection of reliable halo white dwarfs (WDs). The local WD space density we estimate is (1-2) 10^{-5}MSun/pc^{3}, which is about an order of magnitude smaller than the value derived in Oppenheimer et al. (2001), and is consistent with the values obtained from recent reanalyses of the same data (e.g. Reid et al. 2001, Reyle et al. 2001, Torres et al. 2002, Salim et al. 2004). Our result, which corresponds to a fraction of 0.1%-0.2% of the local dark matter, does not support the scenario suggested by the microlensing experiments that ancient cool WDs could contribute significantly to the dark halo of the Milky Way.

arXiv comment9 pages, 4 figures, accepted in Astronomy & Astrophysics

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Cool White Dwarfs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• 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
• Stars on the run: escaping from stellar clusters
• Trigonometric parallaxes of high velocity halo white dwarf candidates
• Discovery of a nearby halo white dwarf with proper motion mu=2.55 arcsec/yr
• New Signatures of the Milky Way Formation in the Local Halo and Inner Halo Streamers in the Era of Gaia
• The GSC-II-based survey of ancient cool white dwarfs I. The sample of spectroscopically confirmed WDs
• Photometric Confirmation of MACHO Large Magellanic Cloud Microlensing Events
• Constraining Galactic Models Through Parallax and Astrometry of Microlensing Events