The Megamaser Cosmology Project. XIII. Combined Hubble Constant Constraints

By D. Pesce, J. Braatz, M. Reid, A. Riess, D. Scolnic, J. Condon, F. Gao, Christian Henkel, C. Impellizzeri, C. Kuo and 1 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2020

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a measurement of the Hubble constant made using geometric distance measurements to megamaser-hosting galaxies. We have applied an improved approach for fitting maser data and obtained better distance estimates for four galaxies previously published by the Megamaser Cosmology Project: UGC 3789, NGC 6264, NGC 6323, and NGC 5765b. Combining these updated distance measurements with those for the maser galaxies CGCG 074-064 and NGC 4258, and assuming a fixed velocity uncertainty of 250 km s−1 associated with peculiar motions, we constrain the Hubble constant to be H0 = 73.9 ± 3.0 km s−1 Mpc−1 independent of distance ladders and the cosmic microwave background. This best value relies solely on maser-based distance and velocity measurements, and it does not use any peculiar velocity corrections. Different approaches for correcting peculiar velocities do not modify H0 by more than ±1σ, with the full range of best-fit Hubble constant values spanning 71.8–76.9 km s−1 Mpc−1. We corroborate prior indications that the local value of H0 exceeds the early-universe value, with a confidence level varying from 95% to 99% for different treatments of the peculiar velocities.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/235e6746e47907cb303c0d500af2c50e3b0aabed

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. T. Treu
2. A. Riess
3. Leon V. E. Koopmans
4. T. Collett
5. Dominique Sluse
6. M. Auger
7. V. Poulin
8. P. J. Marshall

In Instrumentation

1. T. Treu
2. T. Collett
3. A. Riess
4. Leon V. E. Koopmans
5. Dominique Sluse
6. M. Auger
7. A. Bolton
8. Jenny E. Greene

Citations in the corpus

• The Ups and Downs of Early Dark Energy solutions to the Hubble tension: A review of models, hints and constraints circa 2023 (2023, background): “time-delay of strongly-lensed quasars [3, 33, 34], maser distances [35], cosmic chronometers [36], the age of old stars [36–38] or gravitational waves as “standard sirens” [39].”
• 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, background): “Pesce et al. (2020) measured six masers in the Hubble flow; excluding the nearest from that set, NGC 4258 (because its maser distance is used here), and quoting their result in the 2M++ frame (same as our baseline) gives H0= 72.1± 2.7 km s −1 Mpc−1.”
• TDCOSMO IV: Hierarchical time-delay cosmography -- joint inference of the Hubble constant and galaxy density profiles (2020, background): “This selection cut corresponds to D1 = 1.4 Mpc−3 for the subset by Treu et al. (2009).”
• Cosmology Intertwined II: The Hubble Constant Tension (2020, unknown): “[37] D.”