A New Calibration Of Galactic Cepheid Period-Luminosity Relations From B To K Bands, And A Comparison To LMC Relations

By P. Fouqué, P. Arriagada, J. Storm, T. Barnes, N. Nardetto, A. Mérand, Pierre Kervella, W. Gieren, D. Bersier, G. Benedict and 1 more. 2007

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Context. The universality of the Cepheid Period-Luminosity relations has been under discussion since metallicity effects have been assumed to play a role in the value of the intercept and, more recently, of the slope of these relations. Aims. The goal of the present study is to calibrate the Galactic PL relations in various photometric bands (from B to K) and to compare the results to the well-established PL relations in the LMC. Methods. We use a set of 59 calibrating stars, the distances of which are measured using five different distance indicators: Hubble Space Telescope and revised Hipparcos parallaxes, infrared surface brightness and interferometric Baade-Wesselink parallaxes, and classical Zero-Age-Main-Sequence-fitting parallaxes for Cepheids belonging to open clusters or OB stars associations. A detailed discussion of absorption corrections and projection facto r to be used is given. Results. We find no significant di fference in the slopes of the PL relations between LMC and our Galaxy. Conclusions. We conclude that the Cepheid PL relations have universal slopes in all photometric bands, n ot depending on the galaxy under study (at least for LMC and Milky Way). The possible zero-point variation with metal content is not discussed in the present work, but an upper limit of 18.50 for the LMC distance modulus can be deduced from our data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8e64d7cfa5ff11c3c8d6915788fcfdcc471aec65

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Riess
2. A. Filippenko
3. S. Jha
4. W. Freedman
5. Weidong Li
6. Ryan Chornock
7. B. Madore
8. S. Casertano

In Computational Mechanics

1. Weidong Li
2. A. Filippenko
3. A. Riess
4. W. Freedman
5. Ryan Chornock
6. B. Madore
7. S. Jha

Citations in the corpus

• The Hubble Constant (2010, background): “Detailed reviews of the Cepheid distance scale and its calibration can be found in Madore & Freedman (1991), Sandage & Tammann (2006), Fouque et al. (2007) and Barnes (2009).”
• A 3% SOLUTION: DETERMINATION OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT WITH THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE AND WIDE FIELD CAMERA 3 (2011, methodology): “Following analyses of optical and near-IR Cepheid data in the MW (Fouqué et al. 2007) and the LMC (Persson et al. 2004; Udalski et al. 1999), we adopt a conservative constraint on the slope of the Wesenheit relation of −3.3 ± 0.1 mag dex−1 in log P.”
• A REDETERMINATION OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT WITH THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE FROM A DIFFERENTIAL DISTANCE LADDER (2009, methodology): “…Cepheids based on the Baade-Wesselink method or stellar associations as they are much more uncertain than well-measured parallaxes, and the former appear to be under refinement due to uncertainties in their projection factors, as discussed by Fouqué et al. (2007) and van Leeuwen et al. (2007).”