An Improved Distance to NGC 4258 and Its Implications for the Hubble Constant

By M. J. Reid, D. Pesce, A. Riess. Astrophysical Journal, 2019

247 citations recorded by the source corpus.

NGC 4258 is a critical galaxy for establishing the extragalactic distance scale and estimating the Hubble constant ( ). Water masers in the nucleus of the galaxy orbit about its supermassive black hole, and very long baseline interferometric observations of their positions, velocities, and accelerations can be modeled to give a geometric estimate of the angular-diameter distance to the galaxy. We have improved the technique to obtain model parameter values, reducing both statistical and systematic uncertainties compared to previous analyses. We find the distance to NGC 4258 to be 7.576 ± 0.082 (stat.) ± 0.076 (sys.) Mpc. Using this as the sole source of calibration of the Cepheid-SN Ia distance ladder results in km s−1 Mpc−1, and in concert with geometric distances from Milky Way parallaxes and detached eclipsing binaries in the LMC we find km s−1 Mpc−1. The improved distance to NGC 4258 also provides a new calibration of the tip of the red giant branch of mag, with reduced systematic errors for the determination of compared to the LMC-based calibration, because it is measured on the same Hubble Space Telescope (HST) photometric system and through similarly low extinction as SN Ia host halos. The result is km s−1 Mpc−1, in good agreement with the result from the Cepheid route, and there is no difference in when using the same calibration from NGC 4258 and the same SN Ia Hubble diagram intercept to start and end both distance ladders.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/baa5c72b4979f24f802ec16e8de8560e8de52ef9

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Riess
2. Fa-yin Wang
3. Jian-Ping Hu
4. Chung-Pei Ma
5. Jenny E. Greene
6. Ofer Lahav
7. A. Filippenko
8. P. Lemos

In Instrumentation

1. A. Riess
2. Ofer Lahav
3. P. Lemos
4. Paul Shah
5. Jenny E. Greene
6. Fa-yin Wang
7. Jian-Ping Hu
8. Chung-Pei Ma

Citations in the corpus

• On the Evolution of the Hubble Constant with the SNe Ia Pantheon Sample and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations: A Feasibility Study for GRB-Cosmology in 2030 (2022, methodology): “42 km s−1 Mpc−1 [9,10], and the Planck data of Cosmic Microwave background radiation (CMB), H0 = 67.”
• Hubble Tension: The Evidence of New Physics (2023, background): “6 Mpc) [147,175] Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 4258 [176–178].”
• The Hubble Constant from Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances (2021, methodology): “Other recent estimates include (omitting units for brevity) H0= 71.1± 1.9 from the SNe Ia–TRGB method calibrated by the maser distance to NGC 4258 (Reid et al. 2019), 73.3± 1.8 from time delays in gravitationally lensed quasars (Wong et al. 2020, see also Harvey 2020), 73.9± 3.0 from geometrical…”
• Axion and neutrino bounds improved with new calibrations of the tip of the red-giant branch using geometric distance determinations (2020, methodology): “8 mag c Extinction d Absolute I-band TRGB brightness: MTRGB I = I TRGB −AI − μ e Water megamaser with 18 VLBI radio observation epochs [22] f Detached eclipsing binaries [18] g There is no consensus in the literature about the average extinction (foreground and internal) of the LMC, see Sec.”
• A buyer’s guide to the Hubble constant (2021, methodology): “Using Cepheid and SN Ia data from Riess et al. (2016), Reid et al. (2019) find H0 = 72.0± 1.9 km s−1 Mpc−1 using solely NGC 4258 as the geometric calibrator.”
• The Megamaser Cosmology Project. XIII. Combined Hubble Constant Constraints (2020, methodology): “The archetypal AGN accretion disk megamaser system is located in the nearby (7.6 Mpc; Humphreys et al. 2013; Reid et al. 2019) Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 4258 (Claussen et al. 1984; Nakai et al. 1993; Herrnstein et al. 1999).”
• Cosmology Intertwined II: The Hubble Constant Tension (2020, unknown): “[18] M.”
• 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): “Likewise, HST observations of 70 long-period Cepheids in the LMC (Riess et al. 2019b) and improved distance estimates to the LMC (Pietrzyński et al. 2019) and NGC 4258 (Reid et al. 2019) resulted in H0= 73.2± 1.3, raising the difference with Planck+ΛCDM to 4.2σ.”