Milky Way Cepheid Standards for Measuring Cosmic Distances and Application to Gaia DR2: Implications for the Hubble Constant

By A. Riess, Stefano Casertano, W. Yuan, Lucas Macri, B. Bucciarelli, M. Lattanzi, J. Mackenty, J. B. Bowers, Wei Zheng, A. Filippenko and 2 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2018

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We present Hubble Space Telescope (HST) photometry of a selected sample of 50 long-period, low-extinction Milky Way Cepheids measured on the same WFC3 F555W-, F814W-, and F160W-band photometric system as extragalactic Cepheids in Type Ia supernova host galaxies. These bright Cepheids were observed with the WFC3 spatial scanning mode in the optical and near-infrared to mitigate saturation and reduce pixel-to-pixel calibration errors to reach a mean photometric error of 5 mmag per observation. We use the new Gaia DR2 parallaxes and HST photometry to simultaneously constrain the cosmic distance scale and to measure the DR2 parallax zeropoint offset appropriate for Cepheids. We find the latter to be −46 ± 13 μas or ±6 μas for a fixed distance scale, higher than found from quasars, as expected for these brighter and redder sources. The precision of the distance scale from DR2 has been reduced by a factor of 2.5 because of the need to independently determine the parallax offset. The best-fit distance scale is 1.006 ± 0.033, relative to the scale from Riess et al. with H0 = 73.24 km s−1 Mpc−1 used to predict the parallaxes photometrically, and is inconsistent with the scale needed to match the Planck 2016 cosmic microwave background data combined with ΛCDM at the 2.9σ confidence level (99.6%). At 96.5% confidence we find that the formal DR2 errors may be underestimated as indicated. We identify additional errors associated with the use of augmented Cepheid samples utilizing ground-based photometry and discuss their likely origins. Including the DR2 parallaxes with all prior distance-ladder data raises the current tension between the late and early universe route to the Hubble constant to 3.8σ (99.99%). With the final expected precision from Gaia, the sample of 50 Cepheids with HST photometry will limit to 0.5% the contribution of the first rung of the distance ladder to the uncertainty in H0.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/55594e563528858c2c372fb2137fd3f1fde4593b

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Citations in the corpus

A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km s−1 Mpc−1 Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team (2021, methodology): “…luminosities have come from further use of HST WFC3 spatial scanning (Riess et al. 2018b), from Gaia DR2 Cepheid parallaxes with HST photometry (Riess et al. 2018a), from Gaia DR2 Cepheid binary companions and cluster hosts (Breuval et al. 2020), and from Gaia EDR3 parallaxes coupled with…”
Confirmation of the Gaia DR2 Parallax Zero-point Offset Using Asteroseismology and Spectroscopy in the Kepler Field (2018, methodology): “Riess et al. (2018) 8 The angle between the two fields of view of Gaia that allows an absolute measure of parallax.”
Rock ‘n’ roll solutions to the Hubble tension (2019, methodology): “[3], as well as two sets of line-of-sight BOSS DR12 BAO measurements [42]: one calibrated to the sound horizon of the best-fit ΛCDM model (black triangles), and the other calibrated to that of the best-fit n = 2 model (blue diamonds).”
PICO: Probe of Inflation and Cosmic Origins (2019, background): “6σ discrepancy between the CMB- and local-Universe-anchored supernovaebased measurements of the Hubble constant [37, 132]; the identification of lack of correlations at large angles in the T T power spectrum that has an apparent probability of less than 10−3 of occurrence in standard ΛCDM [133]; and”
A buyer’s guide to the Hubble constant (2021, methodology): “An alternative is to work directly with the parallaxes, instead converting Cepheid magnitudes to predicted parallaxes as done by Riess et al. (2018b).”
A Gaia DR2 view of the open cluster population in the Milky Way (2018, result): “As reported in Lindegren et al. (2018) and Arenou et al. (2018; and confirmed by Riess et al. 2018; Zinn et al. 2018; Stassun & Torres 2018), the Gaia DR2 parallaxes are affected by a zero-point offset.”
Neutrino decoupling beyond the Standard Model: CMB constraints on the Dark Matter mass with a fast and precise Neff evaluation (2018, background): “In addition, since the observed values of H0 from CMB [2] and local observations [57–59] are in a ∼ 3σ tension – which could potentially be attributed to a BSM Neff [60] – we also consider the 95% CL Planck 2018 constraint from the combination of Planck+BAO+H0: Neff = 3.”
Early Dark Energy can Resolve the Hubble Tension. (2018, background): “An early-time resolution, which reduces the sound horizon with additional radiation energy density [1,2], is constrained by BAOs and by the higher peaks in theCMBpower spectrum [20,25].”
H0LiCOW – XIII. A 2.4 per cent measurement of H0 from lensed quasars: 5.3σ tension between early- and late-Universe probes (2019, methodology): “Type Ia SNe luminosities are typically calibrated via the ‘distance ladder’ (e.g. Sandage et al. 2006; Freedman et al. 2012; Riess et al. 2016, 2018, 2019), in which parallax measurements are used to determine distances to nearby Cepheid variable stars (which have a known period–luminosity…”
Sounds Discordant: Classical Distance Ladder and ΛCDM-based Determinations of the Cosmological Sound Horizon (2018, methodology): “Recently, Shanks et al. (2019) claimed that corrections applied to the Gaia data (Lindegren et al. 2018) in the R18 analysis have introduced significant systematic error, a claim that has sparked a debate (Riess et al. 2018a; Shanks et al. 2018).”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: A Precise H0 Estimate from DES Y1, BAO, and D/H Data (2017, methodology): “…a flat CDM model of minimal neutrino mass; SPTpol measurements of H0 in the same cosmological model; the local supernovae-based distance ladder measurement of H0 from the SH0ES collaboration (Riess et al. 2018); and the H0LiCOW measurement using multiply imaged quasars from Bonvin et al. (2017).”
Cosmology with a very light Lμ − Lτ gauge boson (2019, background): “In addition to the muon’s magnetic moment, there is also a ∼ 3σ tension between the values of the Hubble constant, H0, as determined from local measurements [6, 7] and from the temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) [8].”