Halo white dwarfs, thick disks, and a sanity check

The recent discovery of a population of high proper-motion white dwarfs by Oppenheimer and coworkers has caused a lot of speculation as to the origin of these stars. I show that the age distribution of the white dwarfs offers a kind of sanity check in these discussions. In particular, the majority of the identified population appears to have a similar age distribution to those in the standard, thin-disk white dwarf population. This is not what is expected for either the halo or thick disk, which are thought to be old populations. A subset of the Oppenheimer "halo" sample does indeed possess an age distribution consistent with a halo origin, but the density is smaller and consistent with the results of Gould, Flynn, & Bahcall for a high-end mass function slope of -0.9.