Luminosity limits on white dwarfs in a Galactic shroud

Abstract

We place observational constraints on a recently proposed Galactic population, dubbed the shroud (Gyuk & Gates 1999, Gates & Gyuk 2001). The shroud would be a very thick Galactic disk of low luminosity objects, most likely old white dwarfs, proposed to explain the optical depth seen in microlensing surveys towards the Magellanic clouds. The shroud is a simple alternative to the lenses being distributed in a classical, near-spherical dark halo; the advantage of the shroud is that it would compose only a fraction of a dark halo’s total mass. In this paper, we argue that stars of the Galactic shroud would be detectable in the recent proper motion survey of Oppenheimer et al. (2001) if their absolute luminosities were brighter than MR59F = 19.4 or approximately MV = 18.6. We adopt a range of simple models of the shroud’s kinematics and morphology, and the colours and luminosities of its white dwarfs; via Monte-Carlo simulations, we predict the numbers expected in the Oppenheimer et al. survey, which would be clearly separated from the numbers produced by white dwarfs of the disk, thick disk and halo. The number of white dwarf detections in the proper motion survey (98) is found to be well explained by the disk, thick disk and halo. With the most conservative kinematic and density parameters for the shroud, and an absolute luminosity of the white dwarfs of MR59F = 17.6, we find that the proper motion survey would detect over 100 WDs, just from the shroud. For a MR59F = 19.4 shroud, the survey would find 5 ± 2 peculiar objects, whereas only two white dwarfs with such characteristics are found in the original data. MR59F = 19.4 corresponds to MV = 18.6 for WDs with (V I) = 1.030.