Cosmic Distances Calibrated to 1% Precision with Gaia EDR3 Parallaxes and Hubble Space Telescope Photometry of 75 Milky Way Cepheids Confirm Tension with ΛCDM

By A. Riess, S. Casertano, W. Yuan, J. B. Bowers, Lucas Macri, Joel C. Zinn, D. Scolnic. 2020

644 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an expanded sample of 75 Milky Way Cepheids with Hubble Space Telescope (HST) photometry and Gaia EDR3 parallaxes, which we use to recalibrate the extragalactic distance ladder and refine the determination of the Hubble constant. All HST observations were obtained with the same instrument (WFC3) and filters (F555W, F814W, F160W) used for imaging of extragalactic Cepheids in Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) hosts. The HST observations used the WFC3 spatial scanning mode to mitigate saturation and reduce pixel-to-pixel calibration errors, reaching a mean photometric error of 5 millimags per observation. We use new Gaia EDR3 parallaxes, greatly improved since DR2, and the period–luminosity (P–L) relation of these Cepheids to simultaneously calibrate the extragalactic distance ladder and to refine the determination of the Gaia EDR3 parallax offset. The resulting geometric calibration of Cepheid luminosities has 1.0% precision, better than any alternative geometric anchor. Applied to the calibration of SNe Ia, it results in a measurement of the Hubble constant of 73.0 ± 1.4 km s−1 Mpc−1, in good agreement with conclusions based on earlier Gaia data releases. We also find the slope of the Cepheid P–L relation in the Milky Way, and the metallicity dependence of its zero-point, to be in good agreement with the mean values derived from other galaxies. In combination with the best complementary sources of Cepheid calibration, we reach 1.8% precision and find H0 = 73.2 ± 1.3 km s−1 Mpc−1, a 4.2σ difference with the prediction from Planck CMB observations under ΛCDM. We expect to reach ∼1.3% precision in the near term from an expanded sample of ∼40 SNe Ia in Cepheid hosts.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3d9faf20563e6ca4b36f4e8a6988feab028ed92

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Riess
2. Ofer Lahav
3. A. Filippenko
4. S. Jha
5. D. Scolnic
6. P. Lemos
7. Paul Shah
8. Fa-yin Wang

In Instrumentation

1. A. Riess
2. Ofer Lahav
3. P. Lemos
4. Paul Shah
5. Fa-yin Wang
6. Jian-Ping Hu
7. S. Jha
8. A. Cimatti

Citations in the corpus

• A buyer’s guide to the Hubble constant (2021, methodology): “During the preparation of this review, Gaia Early Data Release 3 was made available, and has already by used by Riess et al. (2021) to revisit Gaia parallaxes.”
• Toward a Better Understanding of Cosmic Chronometers: A New Measurement of H(z) at z ∼ 0.7 (2021, methodology): “A recent measurement of H0 in the local Universe has been obtained by Riess et al. (2021) using the luminosity distances of type Ia supernovae calibrated with Cepheid variable stars, H0 = 73.2 ± 1.3 km s−1 Mpc−1 at 68% C.L.”
• A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km s−1 Mpc−1 Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team (2021, methodology): “The constraints are not identical to those provided in Riess et al. (2021) because they employ the same P–”
• Hubble Tension: The Evidence of New Physics (2023, methodology): “[39], the extended analyses were given by Perivolaropoulos and Skara [444] in a detailed and comprehensive manner.”