Deviations from the Local Hubble Flow. I. The Tip of the Red Giant Branch as a Distance Indicator

By B. Mendez, M. Davis, John Moustakas, J. Newman, B. Madore, W. Freedman. 2002

160 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The properties of the velocity field in the local volume (cz < 550 km s-1) have been difficult to constrain because of a lack of a consistent set of galaxy distances. The sparse observations available to date suggest a remarkably quiet flow, with little deviation from a pure Hubble law. However, velocity field models based on the distribution of galaxies in the 1.2 Jy IRAS redshift survey predict a quadrupolar flow pattern locally with strong infall at the poles of the local supergalactic plane. We probe this velocity field and begin to establish a consistent set of galactic distances. We have obtained images of nearby galaxies in the I and V bands from the W. M. Keck Observatory and in F814W and F555W filters from the Hubble Space Telescope. Where these galaxies are well resolved into stars, we can use the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) as a distance indicator. Using a maximum likelihood analysis to quantitatively measure the I magnitude of the TRGB, we determine precise distances to seven nearby galaxies: Leo I, Sextans B, NGC 1313, NGC 3109, UGC 3755, UGC 6456, and UGC 7577.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ea5b3dd7826a83b9f8d3b4dec7fedef9fb79912

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Citations in the corpus

Associations of Dwarf Galaxies (2006, methodology): “The location of the TRGB can be identified with sobel filter edge detection methods (Sakai et al. 1996) or – 6 – maximum likelihood methods Méndez et al. (2002).”
THE GHOSTS SURVEY. I. HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE ADVANCED CAMERA FOR SURVEYS DATA (2011, methodology): “Specifically, we used the logarithmic edge-detection algorithm defined in Méndez et al. (2002) on stars selected with a color cut to remove both MS and redder AGB stars.”
ASTROPHYSICAL TESTS OF MODIFIED GRAVITY: CONSTRAINTS FROM DISTANCE INDICATORS IN THE NEARBY UNIVERSE (2012, methodology): “Methods like Sobel edge-detection (Lee et al. 1993), maximum likelihood (Méndez et al. 2002), etc., were used to estimate the TRGB magnitude.”
THE ACS NEARBY GALAXY SURVEY TREASURY. IX. CONSTRAINING ASYMPTOTIC GIANT BRANCH EVOLUTION WITH OLD METAL-POOR GALAXIES (2010, methodology): “Selecting AGB and RGB stars To identify the location of RGB stars, we adopted the magnitude of the TRGB (mTRGB) from Dalcanton et al. (2009), who identified the TRGB in uncrowded low extinction regions of each galaxy using the edge-detection method of Méndez et al. (2002).”
Tip of the Red Giant Branch Distances. I. Optimization of a Maximum Likelihood Algorithm (2006, methodology): “From early applications involving simply the visual identification of the termination of the RGB, there has been a succession of more sophisticated techniques to improve the reliability and accuracy of the TRGBmeasurement (Lee et al. 1993; Sakai et al. 1996; Méndez et al. 2002, hereafter M02).”
A Catalog of Neighboring Galaxies (2004, unknown): “66 29 51 Mendez et al. 2002 03 20 07.4......”
THE EXTRAGALACTIC DISTANCE DATABASE: COLOR–MAGNITUDE DIAGRAMS (2009, methodology): “Over the years TRGB measurement methods have become more sophisticated and reproducible (e.g. Lee et al. 1993; Mendez et al. 2002; Makarov et al. 2006; Mager et al. 2008).”
Local galaxy flows within 5 Mpc (2002, methodology): “Recently Mendez et al. (2002) have observed UGC 3755 with the WFPC2 and determined the TRGB distance modulus to be 28.m52±0.m07.”
The Effect of Metallicity on Cepheid-based Distances (2004, methodology): “Therefore, in addition to the edge-detection method described above, we have also applied a modification of the cross-correlation (CC) technique introduced by Méndez et al. (2002).”
THE EXTRAGALACTIC DISTANCE DATABASE (2009, background): “The magnitude of the TRGB is indicated by the broken horizontal line. the distance is less than 10 Mpc (Lee et al. 1993; Sakai et al. 1996; Méndez et al. 2002; Karachentsev et al. 2006; Makarov et al. 2006; Rizzi et al. 2007).”
COSMICFLOWS-2: THE DATA (2013, methodology): “One peak at distance errors 8− 10% results from the input of precision estimators such as Cepheid PLR, TRGB, and SNIa and from groups with many contributions (the entities with the lowest error estimates are either in the proximity of the Local Group or, such as the Virgo Clus- ter, with many contri”
THE ACS NEARBY GALAXY SURVEY TREASURY (2007, methodology): “TRGB magnitudes were determined using the edge-detection filter described in Méndez et al. (2002) applied to a Gaussian-smoothed luminosity function as in Sakai et al. (1996) and Seth et al. (2005b).”
Distances to nearby galaxies in Sculptor (2003, methodology): “…the uncertainties in the extinction and reddening are taken to be 10% of their values from Schlegel et al. (1998); [for more details on the total budget of internal and external systematic errors for the TRGB method see Mendez et al. (2002)]; and (9) linear distance in Mpc and its uncertainty.”
Tip of the Red Giant Branch Distances. II. Zero-Point Calibration (2007, methodology): “A different approach was suggested by Méndez et al. (2002), who applied a maximum-likelihood technique based on the assumption that the luminosity function at the TRGB can be described as a step TIP OF THE RED GIANT BRANCH DISTANCES.”
Star Formation Properties of a Large Sample of Irregular Galaxies (2004, unknown): “…(17) Lee et al. 1999; (18) Lee & Kim 2000; (19) Maiz-Apellaniz, Cieza, & Mackenty 2002; (20) Makarova et al. 1998; (21) Massey & Armandroff 1995; (22) Méndez et al. 2002; (23) Miller et al. 2001; (24) Minniti & Zijlstra 1997; (25) O’Connell et al. 1994; (26) Tolstoy et al. 1995; and (27) Tosi et…”