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).Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. MNRAS style fil
