TOWARD A NEW GEOMETRIC DISTANCE TO THE ACTIVE GALAXY NGC 4258. III. FINAL RESULTS AND THE HUBBLE CONSTANT

By L. Humphreys, M. Reid, J. Moran, L. Greenhill, A. Argon. 2013

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report a new geometric maser distance estimate to the active galaxy NGC 4258. The data for the new model are maser line-of-sight (LOS) velocities and sky positions from 18 epochs of very long baseline interferometry observations, and LOS accelerations measured from a 10 yr monitoring program of the 22 GHz maser emission of NGC 4258. The new model includes both disk warping and confocal elliptical maser orbits with differential precession. The distance to NGC 4258 is 7.60 ± 0.17 ± 0.15 Mpc, a 3% uncertainty including formal fitting and systematic terms. The resulting Hubble constant, based on the use of the Cepheid variables in NGC 4258 to recalibrate the Cepheid distance scale, is H0 = 72.0 ± 3.0 km s−1 Mpc−1.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/607d5042eb93c2325d134786f692b90288a78a90

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Citations in the corpus

An Improved Distance to NGC 4258 and Its Implications for the Hubble Constant (2019, methodology): “The last three papers (i.e., starting with Humphreys et al. (2013)) used the same data set, with the latter two papers improving the analysis approach.”
A 2.4% DETERMINATION OF THE LOCAL VALUE OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT (2016, methodology): “A precise geometric distance to NGC 4258 measured to 3% using water masers (Humphreys et al. 2013, hereafter H13) has provided a new anchor galaxy whose Cepheids can be observed with the same instrument and filters as those in SNIa hosts to effectively cancel the effect of photometric zeropoint…”
CONFIRMATION OF A STAR FORMATION BIAS IN TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA DISTANCES AND ITS EFFECT ON THE MEASUREMENT OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT (2014, methodology): “The final corrected value, including the revised NGC 4258 megamaser distance (Humphreys et al. 2013), the refined Cepheid analysis of Efstathiou (2014), and backing out the small host-mass correction implemented in SH0ES11, becomes H0 = 70.6 ± 2.6 km s−1 Mpc−1 when starting from the main SH0ES11 ana”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, methodology): “One important change in this analysis is a shift to Cepheid calibration based on the maser distances to NGC 4258 (Herrnstein et al., 1999; Humphreys et al., 2008, 2013) and on parallaxes to Galactic Cepheids measured with Hipparcos (van Leeuwen et al., 2007) and with the HST fine-guidance sensors…”
A buyer’s guide to the Hubble constant (2021, methodology): “Humphreys et al. (2013) have observed NGC 4258 for 10 years at 6 monthly intervals using VLBI interferometry, which resolves the relative position of the maser spots to < 3 µas accuracy (even the tectonic drift of the ground radio telescopes must be corrected for).”
Clarifying the Hubble constant tension with a Bayesian hierarchical model of the local distance ladder (2017, methodology): “Using distances and parallaxes as data rather than distance moduli means we can also sample from non-Gaussian anchor likelihoods if merited: for example, the MASER distance constraint derived from a model of the MASER motion has a mildly non-Gaussian form (Humphreys et al. 2013; Riess et al. 2016).”
The Megamaser Cosmology Project. XIII. Combined Hubble Constant Constraints (2020, background): “The archetypal AGN accretion disk megamaser system is located in the nearby (7.6 Mpc; Humphreys et al. 2013; Reid et al. 2019) Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 4258 (Claussen et al. 1984; Nakai et al. 1993; Herrnstein et al. 1999).”
THE 1% CONCORDANCE HUBBLE CONSTANT (2014, methodology): “Efstathiou (2014) makes a different Cepheid selection and uses the Humphreys et al. (2013) distance to NGC 4258 to obtain H0 = 70.6± 3.3 km s −1Mpc−1, using the NGC 4258 recalibration alone, and H0 = 72.5 ± 2.5 km s −1Mpc−1 using all three calibration methods.”
Microarcsecond Radio Astrometry (2013, background): “Recently, Humphreys et al. (2013) analyzed a decade of observations of NGC 4258 and, via more detailed modeling of disk kinematics, obtained an extremely accurate distance of 7.60 ± 0.23 Mpc, which constrains Radio Astrometry 11 H0 = 72.0± 3.0 km s−1 Mpc−1.”
THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH DATA RELEASES OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY: FINAL DATA FROM SDSS-III (2015, methodology): “Spectra of H2O Maser Galaxies: One current route to the absolute calibration of the luminosities of Type Ia supernovae (SNeIa) as standard candles uses the 3%-accurate distance to NGC 4258 afforded by the well-studied H2O maser in its center (Humphreys et al. 2013).”