Consistent Calibration of the Tip of the Red Giant Branch in the Large Magellanic Cloud on the Hubble Space Telescope Photometric System and a Redetermination of the Hubble Constant

By W. Yuan, A. Riess, Lucas Macri, S. Casertano, D. Scolnic. Astrophysical Journal, 2019

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a calibration of the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)/ACS F814W system. We use archival HST observations to derive blending corrections and photometric transformations for two ground-based wide-area imaging surveys of the Magellanic Clouds. We show that these surveys are biased bright by up to ∼0.1 mag in the optical due to blending, and that the bias is a function of local stellar density. We correct the LMC TRGB magnitudes from Jang & Lee and use the geometric distance from Pietrzyński et al. to obtain an absolute TRGB magnitude of . Applying this calibration to the TRGB magnitudes from Freedman et al. in SN Ia hosts yields a value for the Hubble constant of H0 = 72.4 ± 2.0 km s−1 Mpc−1 for their TRGB+SNe Ia distance ladder. The difference in the TRGB calibration and the value of H0 derived here and by Freedman et al. primarily results from their overestimate of the LMC extinction, caused by inconsistencies in their different sources of TRGB photometry for the Magellanic Clouds. Using the same source of photometry (OGLE) for both Clouds and applying the aforementioned corrections yields a value for the LMC I-band TRGB extinction that is lower by 0.06 mag, consistent with independent OGLE reddening maps used by us and by Jang & Lee to calibrate TRGB and determine H0.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bdacc028852e45751df793d3663ab671a195d336

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Citations in the corpus

H0LiCOW – XIII. A 2.4 per cent measurement of H0 from lensed quasars: 5.3σ tension between early- and late-Universe probes (2019, methodology): “…SNe that are close enough for Cepheid and/or TRGB distance measurements), and there is an ongoing debate about the results from this method (e.g. Yuan et al. 2019), further highlighting the need for additional independent probes (see Verde, Treu & Riess 2019 for a recent review of the field).”
An Improved Distance to NGC 4258 and Its Implications for the Hubble Constant (2019, methodology): “…have low angular resolution that results in blending (Yuan et al. 2019), and extinction of the TRGB toward the LMC is a substantial AI ≥ 0.1 mag and difficult to estimate, with differences in recent estimates of AI ≈ 0.06±0.02 mag (Freedman, Madore & Hatt 2019; Yuan et al. 2019; Jang & Lee 2017).”
Axion and neutrino bounds improved with new calibrations of the tip of the red-giant branch using geometric distance determinations (2020, methodology): “Y19: Yuan et al. (2019) [21]. a contribution from the empirical bolometric correction (BC), which is essential to compare with observational data.”
The Hubble Constant from Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances (2021, methodology): “Also using the LMC-based TRGB method to calibrate SNe Ia but with a different treatment of the extinction for the LMC calibration stars, Yuan et al. (2019) report H0= 72.4± 2.0 km s−1 Mpc−1.”
Calibration of the Tip of the Red Giant Branch (2003, result): “Appendix Comments on the Yuan et al. (2019) Paper After reverse-engineering the calibration plot presented in Freedman et al. (2019), Y19 concluded that the results of our paper were incorrect.”
The expansion of the Universe is faster than expected (2020, background): “Miras are variable, red giant stars recently pressed into service to measure H0 as a check on both Cepheids and TRGB and yield H0=73.3±3.9 km s-1 Mpc-1 using new HST observations and the previously discussed geometric distances [8].”
A buyer’s guide to the Hubble constant (2021, unknown): “Yuan et al. (2019) adopt the standard reddening law of Fitzpatrick (1999)).”