A REDETERMINATION OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT WITH THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE FROM A DIFFERENTIAL DISTANCE LADDER

By A. Riess, Lucas Macri, S. Casertano, M. Sosey, H. Lampeitl, H. Ferguson, A. Filippenko, S. Jha, Weidong Li, Ryan Chornock and 1 more. 2009

706 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This is the second of two papers reporting results from a program to determine the Hubble constant to ∼5% precision from a refurbished distance ladder based on extensive use of differential measurements. Here we report observations of 240 Cepheid variables obtained with the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) Camera 2 through the F160W filter on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The Cepheids are distributed across six recent hosts of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and the “maser galaxy” NGC 4258, allowing us to directly calibrate the peak luminosities of the SNe Ia from the precise, geometric distance measurements provided by the masers. New features of our measurement include the use of the same instrument for all Cepheid measurements across the distance ladder and homogeneity of the Cepheid periods and metallicities, thus necessitating only a differential measurement of Cepheid fluxes and reducing the largest systematic uncertainties in the determination of the fiducial SN Ia luminosity. In addition, the NICMOS measurements reduce the effects of differential extinction in the host galaxies by a factor of ∼5 over past optical data. Combined with a greatly expanded set of 240 SNe Ia at z < 0.1 which define their magnitude–redshift relation, we find H0 = 74.2 ± 3.6 km s−1 Mpc−1, a 4.8% uncertainty including both statistical and systematic errors. To independently test the maser calibration, we use 10 individual parallax measurements of Galactic Cepheids obtained with the HST fine guidance sensor and find similar results. We show that the factor of 2.2 improvement in the precision of H0 is a significant aid to the determination of the equation-of-state parameter of dark energy, w = P/(ρc2). Combined with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe five-year measurement of ΩMh2, we find w = −1.12 ± 0.12 independent of any information from high-redshift SNe Ia or baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). This result is also consistent with analyses based on the combination of high-redshift SNe Ia and BAO. The constraints on w(z) now including high-redshift SNe Ia and BAO are consistent with a cosmological constant and are improved by a factor of 3 due to the refinement in H0 alone. We show that future improvements in the measurement of H0 are likely and should further contribute to multi-technique studies of dark energy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec7f333e6624b6992e917be67966a1b3ffae6dbb

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

Citations in the corpus

The Rh=ct universe (2011, methodology): “This unique solution corresponds to the observed equality Rh(t0) = ct0, which is most easily inferred from the measurement ofH0 in the SHOES project (Riess et al. 2009), refining the value previously obtained through the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the extragalactic distance scale (Mould…”
H 0 revisited (2013, methodology): “Since then, two Cepheid based programmes have been underway with the aim of reducing the error on H0: the Supernovae and H0 for the Equation of State (SH0ES) programme of R11 (with earlier results reported in Riess et al. 2009) and the Carnegie Hubble Program of Freedman et al. (2012).”
CFHTLenS: combined probe cosmological model comparison using 2D weak gravitational lensing (2012, methodology): “We combine the CFHTLenS data with 7-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP7), baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO): SDSS-III (BOSS) and a Hubble Space Telescope distance-ladder prior on the Hubble constant to get joint constraints.”
THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE: SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH-SELECTED GALAXY CLUSTERS AT 148 GHz IN THE 2008 SURVEY (2010, background): “…been expanded to statistically significant samples of clusters (e.g., the OVRO/BIMA studies by Reese et al. 2002 and Bonamente et al. 2006) and serve as an independent check on estimates that rely on the conventional extragalactic distance ladder (e.g., Freedman et al. 2001; Riess et al. 2009).”
Evidence of the accelerated expansion of the Universe from weak lensing tomography with COSMOS (2009, methodology): “Employing the recent distance ladder estimate h = 0.742± 0.036 (Riess et al. 2009) instead of the HST Key Project constraint, we obtainq0 < 0 at 94.8% confidence.”
NINE-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETER RESULTS (2012, background): “In a parallel approach, Riess et al. (2009) redesigned the distance ladder and its observations to control the systematic errors that dominated the measurements.”
Gravitationally lensed quasars and supernovae in future wide-field optical imaging surveys (2010, background): “…Hubble constant from the statistical analysis of the current lensed quasar sample (Saha et al. 2006; Oguri 2007a; Coles 2008) have yielded values consistent with constraints from other cosmological probes (e.g. Freedman et al. 2001; Bonamente et al. 2006; Riess et al. 2009; Komatsu et al. 2009).”
THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE: COSMOLOGY FROM GALAXY CLUSTERS DETECTED VIA THE SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH EFFECT (2010, background): “…component responsible for the universe’s accelerated expansion, is believed to be the energy of the vacuum with a constant equation of state parameter, w, equal to −1 (e.g., Riess et al. 2009; Brown et al. 2009; Hicken et al. 2009; Kessler et al. 2009; Percival et al. 2010; Komatsu et al. 2011).”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, methodology): “…clusters (Henry et al., 2009; Mantz et al., 2010; Vikhlinin et al., 2009; Rozo et al., 2010), by improved measurements of the Hubble constant (Riess et al., 2009, 2011; Freedman et al., 2012), and by CMB data from the WMAP satellite (Bennett et al., 2003; Larson et al., 2011) and from…”
Cosmic chronometers: constraining the equation of state of dark energy. I: H(z) measurements (2009, positive): “[51] and a factor of two improvement over our previous study [54].”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS‐III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological implications of the large‐scale two‐point correlation function (2012, background): “…Riess et al. 1998; Perlmutter et al. 1999; Spergel et al. 2003; Riess et al. 2004; Tegmark et al. 2004; Sánchez et al. 2006; Spergel et al. 2007; Riess et al. 2009; Komatsu et al. 2009; Sánchez et al. 2009; Komatsu 2010; Percival et al. 2010; Reid et al. 2010a; Riess et al. 2011; Blake et al.…”