The Hubble Constant from Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances

By J. Blakeslee, J. Jensen, Chung-Pei Ma, P. Milne, Jenny E. Greene. Astrophysical Journal, 2021

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a measurement of the Hubble constant H 0 from surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) distances for 63 bright, mainly early-type galaxies out to 100 Mpc observed with the WFC3/IR on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The sample is drawn from several independent HST imaging programs using the F110W bandpass, with the majority of the galaxies being selected from the MASSIVE survey. The distances reach the Hubble flow with a median statistical uncertainty per measurement of 4%. We construct the Hubble diagram with these IR SBF distances and constrain H 0 using four different treatments of the galaxy velocities. For the SBF zero-point calibration, we use both the existing tie to Cepheid variables, updated for consistency with the latest determination of the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud from detached eclipsing binaries, and a new tie to the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) calibrated from the maser distance to NGC 4258. These two SBF calibrations are consistent with each other and with theoretical predictions from stellar population models. From a weighted average of the Cepheid and TRGB calibrations, we derive H 0 = 73.3 ± 0.7 ± 2.4 km s−1 Mpc−1, where the error bars reflect the statistical and systematic uncertainties. This result accords well with recent measurements of H 0 from Type Ia supernovae, time delays in multiply lensed quasars, and water masers. The systematic uncertainty could be reduced to below 2% by calibrating the SBF method with precision TRGB distances for a statistical sample of massive early-type galaxies out to the Virgo cluster measured with the James Webb Space Telescope.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58fd83d9a3adb6fe4acb23088bdde4457bed39a0

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Riess
2. A. Filippenko
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4. D. Scolnic
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6. Lucas Macri
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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

• A buyer’s guide to the Hubble constant (2021, unknown): “Promising methods that we did not have space to discuss are Surface Brightness Fluctuations (Tonry and Schneider 1988; Blakeslee et al. 2021; Khetan et al. 2021),”
• 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): “Blakeslee et al. (2021) measured the IR surface brightness fluctuation distances with HST in 63 galaxies calibrated by the TRGB in the 2M++ frame.”