Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Oct 2000
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000aas...196.0706g&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 196th AAS Meeting, #07.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 32, p.1280
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
A recent paper by Ibata et al. (1999, ApJ, 524, 95) tried to identify faint white dwarfs in the Milky Way halo by searching for proper motions in the Hubble Deep Field. They found five objects which they claimed had significant proper motions which they interpreted as evidence that a large fraction of the mass of the Milky Way halo is made of white dwarfs. We suggest an alternative interpretation of their result. The objects detected are too dim to reliably seperate stars from galaxies. If the ``moving objects'' are actually extended sources, such as faint background galaxies, then Ibata et al. underestimated their astrometric uncertainty by at least a factor of 2. Thus, the motions they detect are not statistically significant given the larger astrometric uncertainty.
Conti Alberto
Graff David S.
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