THE ARAUCARIA PROJECT. THE DISTANCE TO THE SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD FROM LATE-TYPE ECLIPSING BINARIES

By D. Graczyk, G. Pietrzyński, I. Thompson, W. Gieren, B. Pilecki, P. Konorski, A. Udalski, Igor Soszynski, S. Villanova, M. G'orski and 5 more. 2013

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We present a distance determination to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) based on an analysis of four detached, long-period, late-type eclipsing binaries discovered by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) survey. The components of the binaries show negligible intrinsic variability. A consistent set of stellar parameters was derived with low statistical and systematic uncertainty. The absolute dimensions of the stars are calculated with a precision of better than 3%. The surface brightness–infrared color relation was used to derive the distance to each binary. The four systems clump around a distance modulus of (m − M) = 18.99 with a dispersion of only 0.05 mag. Combining these results with the distance published by Graczyk et al. for the eclipsing binary OGLE SMC113.3 4007, we obtain a mean distance modulus to the SMC of 18.965 ± 0.025 (stat.) ± 0.048 (syst.) mag. This corresponds to a distance of 62.1 ± 1.9 kpc, where the error includes both uncertainties. Taking into account other recent published determinations of the SMC distance we calculated the distance modulus difference between the SMC and the Large Magellanic Cloud equal to 0.458 ± 0.068 mag. Finally, we advocate μSMC = 18.95 ± 0.07 as a new “canonical” value of the distance modulus to this galaxy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61dcb1b5d0901f52aba251f1340779f034d33e8c

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Citations in the corpus

CLUSTERING OF LOCAL GROUP DISTANCES: PUBLICATION BIAS OR CORRELATED MEASUREMENTS? III. THE SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD (2014, background): “…Graczyk et al. (2014) combined new measurements of four late-type EBs (ltEBs) with their earlier estimate of the distance to OGLE-SC10 137844 (Graczyk et al. 2012, 2013) to arrive at (m−M)ltEB0 = 18.965 ± 0.025 ± 0.048 mag, (2) where the uncertainties again refer to the statistical and…”