Calibration of the Tip of the Red Giant Branch

By W. Freedman, B. Madore, Taylor J. Hoyt, I. Jang, R. Beaton, M. Lee, A. Monson, J. Neeley, J. Rich. Astrophysical Journal, 2003

356 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) method provides one of the most accurate and precise means of measuring the distances to nearby galaxies. Here we present a multi-wavelength, VIJHK absolute calibration of the TRGB based on observations of TRGB stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), grounded on a geometric distance, determined by detached eclipsing binaries (DEBs). This paper presents a more detailed description of the method first presented by Freedman et al. for measuring corrections for the total line-of-sight extinction and reddening to the LMC. In this method, we use a differential comparison of the red giant population in the LMC, first with red giants in the Local Group galaxy IC 1613, and then with those in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). As a consistency check, we derive an independent calibration of the TRGB sequence using the SMC alone, invoking its geometric distance also calibrated by DEBs. An additional consistency check comes from near-infrared observations of Galactic globular clusters covering a wide range of metallicities. In all cases we find excellent agreement in the zero-point calibration. We then examine the recent claims by Yuan et al., demonstrating that, in the case of the SMC, they corrected for extinction alone while neglecting the essential correction for reddening. In the case of IC 1613, we show that their analysis contains an incorrect treatment of (over-correction for) metallicity. Using our revised (and direct) measurement of the LMC TRGB extinction, we find a value of H0 = 69.6 ± 0.8 (±1.1% stat) ± 1.7 (±2.4% sys) km s−1 Mpc−1.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad07ae21117eae4a7118b467b919897b2dcd20a0

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Citations in the corpus

Measurements of the Hubble Constant: Tensions in Perspective (2021, background): “Given a known (flat) TRGB slope in the I band, the corresponding slope of the giant branch luminosity with color, at any other given wavelength, is not arbitrary; it is a priori mathematically defined for the other wavelengths (Madore & Freedman 2020).”
Hubble Tension: The Evidence of New Physics (2023, methodology): “[158] using their revised measurement of the Large Magellanic Cloud TRGB extinction.”
Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological implications from two decades of spectroscopic surveys at the Apache Point Observatory (2020, methodology): “Similar efforts include the use of other distance indicators such as the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB; e.g., Freedman et al. 2020), Tully-Fisher relation in galaxies (TFR; e.g., Neill et al. 2014), or gravitational waves from neutron star-neutron star mergers (e.g., Abbott et al. 2017a).”
The Hubble Constant from Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances (2021, background): “For consistency with other recent studies (e.g., Riess et al. 2019; Freedman et al. 2019, 2020), we also apply this shift in zero point.”
Axion and neutrino bounds improved with new calibrations of the tip of the red-giant branch using geometric distance determinations (2020, methodology): “…We use the 2020 update at https://www.canfar.net/storage/list /STETSON/homogeneous/Latest photometry for targets with at least BVI/ In principle, one could use the list of globular clusters with good kinematical distances of Baumgardt et al. (2019) and repeat the exercise of Freedman et al. (2020).”
TDCOSMO IV: Hierarchical time-delay cosmography -- joint inference of the Hubble constant and galaxy density profiles (2020, methodology): “The Carnegie–Chicago Hubble Project (CCHP) using the distance ladder method with SNe Ia and the tip of the red giant branch measures H0 = 69.6 ± 1.9 km s−1 Mpc−1 (Freedman et al. 2019, 2020).”
Early dark energy does not restore cosmological concordance (2020, methodology): “…cosmic distance ladder and/or other data sets may be the ultimate explanation, the growing severity of the tension (modulo the recent TRGB result in Freedman et al. (2020)) provides impetus to examine theoretical explanations and explore alternative cosmologies that may restore cosmological…”
Cosmology Intertwined II: The Hubble Constant Tension (2020, unknown): “[25] W.”